| Summary: | This paper seeks to read into the nuances of masculinity in Chinua Achebe’s novels Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) and to understand how masculinity plays a crucial role in the power struggle between indigenous society and polity and the colonial administration. It attempts to explore the playing out of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ among the colonial administrators in their home country and how it percolates down to the Igbo people who find themselves wedged between disparate sets of gender dynamics and values in the wake of the establishment of the phallocentric project of colonialism. It will engage with the intricate network of power and exhibitionism which go into the making of notions of hegemonic masculinity that are at odds with indigenous norms and manifestations of masculinity. It looks at masculinity as “simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture” (Connell 2013: 253) within the ambit of relations forged between the coloniser and the colonised. ‘Hegemonic masculinity’—“the the form of masculinity which is culturally dominant in a given setting” (Connell 2001:17)—can be seen as a key element that perpetuates new social norms which disrupt indigenous norms already in place. This necessitates a critical engagement with how the crisis in ways of “doing” masculinity inevitably leads to the crisis of disintegration of indigenous societies. This paper will attempt to trace the trajectory of this crisis and disintegration through a reading of the politics of masculinity in Achebe’s novels Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God.
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