Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History

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An imaginative, narratological reading of Chinua Achebe's novels, stories, poetry, and essays through a literary and historical framework. Toyin Falola analyzes fictional and historical cartographies of Africa in Achebes literary works to offer a critical representation of Africa's present and future. In particular, he focuses on the historical valuation of a full range of the writer's works novels including Things Fall Apart, but also short stories, poems, and essays as important materials that have contributed to the political events in Nigeria and, by extension, Africa. The raw creativity found in Achebes stories and his ability to tell the Nigerian story precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial have endeared him to many, including readers and those critical of him and his works. Chinua Achebe: Narrating Africa in Fictions and History analyzes all of the writers works, dwelling on the Nigerian political context upon which many, if not all, of his narratives lie. As a result, it examines methodologies of narration and ideologies that allow his works to resonate with the imagination of Africa.

Author Bio

Toyin Falola is Professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His publications include Fela Anikulapo-Kuti: Afrobeat, Rebellion, and Philosophy (with Adeshina Afolayan; Bloomsbury, 2022), Wole Soyinka: Literature, Activism, and African Transformation (with Bola Dauda; Bloomsbury, 2021), Understanding Modern Nigeria: Ethnicity, Democracy, and Development (2021), and Nigerian Political Modernity and Postcolonial Predicaments (2016). Falola has served as the General Secretary of the Historical Society of Nigeria, the President of the African Studies Association, Vice-President of UNESCO Slave Route Project, and the Kluge Chair of the Countries of the South, Library of Congress. He is a member of the Scholars Council, Kluge Center, the Library of Congress. He has received over 30 lifetime career awards and 14 honorary doctorates.