A Postcolonial Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Superiority/Inferiority Complex, Native Ibo Culture and African ‘‘englishes’’ Writing

• Main Authors: Jia-pei Li, 李佳珮
• Other Authors: Shu-ching Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/4557wh

碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 外國語文學系所 === 105 === A globally acclaimed novel, Things Fall Apart is the debut novel written by the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe in 1958. Achebe’s life experience of the cultural hybridization builds up a special vision for him to review and perceive the colonial nuance of his time. He depicts a story about the tribal lives of the Ibo natives and the cultural crash of the British colonization in Nigeria in the late 1800’s. Readers appreciate this novel for its realistic portrayal of the Ibo tribe that presents as an epitome of Africa. He employs this novel to respond to and rewrite the earlier accounts on African culture made by western writers and thinkers, which blacken the African as a barbarous, primitive and inferior other. He takes on the task of narrating and reconstructing the various dimensions of the Ibo culture in Nigeria. By using his innovative language, new ‘‘englishes,’’ he articulates the Ibo history, the social condition, the intersection of cultures, and the cultural discrimination in the British colonization. The principal aim of this thesis is to illustrate Achebe’s reconstruction of the value of the Ibo culture by examining his narrative technique and his usage of African englishes. In Chapter One, I undertake an analysis of Frantz Fanon’s concept of Superiority/Inferiority complex in order to illuminate the psychological condition of the colonial society in this novel. Chapter Two discusses the way in which Achebe reconstructs and criticizes the Ibo culture by means of examining the Ibo religion, the moral sense, and the social value of the Ibos. The last Chapter focuses on the language using of Achebe’s new ‘‘englishes’’ in this novel, consisting of the oral tradition, local knowledge, and Ibo tribalism. Achebe successfully voices the brilliance of the Ibo cultural legacy and articulates its specific way of acculturation through displaying the language and cultural diversity of the Ibos, and its way of encountering the British in the cultural contact zone.