Author:

Keywords:

Chinua Achebe, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Postcolonial Mimesis, Mimicry, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Arts & Humanities, Literature, ACHEBE, 2005 Literary Studies, Literary Studies, 4705 Literary studies

Abstract:

This article draws a new picture of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) and reframes the race quarrel that opposed Achebe to Conrad from a mimetic perspective. I demonstrate that the images of mimetic “frenzy” (or trance) Achebe denounces in Heart of Darkness are also at work in Achebe’s celebrated postcolonial counter-narrative. My goal is not to reiterate a “rhetoric and politics of blame” (Said, 1994), but to supplement influential accounts of “colonial mimicry” via a form of “postcolonial mimesis” that entails a representation of the other that is almost the opposite, but not quite.