Africa Writes Back: How the African Writer Reverses Discourses of Eurocentrism

• Main Authors: Hsu, Shuang-Yu, 許雙于
• Other Authors: Chen, Huang-Hua
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/4s9fx9

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 106 === In the literature of English language, the literary tradition has been dominated by the European intellectual tradition. In some literary works, the concept of Eurocentrism tends to posit the non-European subjects as the Other, as everything that the West is not. Therefore, the modern African literature cannot ignore the Western literary tradition that relates to Africa with a Eurocentric point of view. This thesis explores the complexity of Eurocentrism and how the modern African writer Chinua Achebe engages in the assertion of African subjectivity in the postcolonial discourse. The African writer writes novels and critical essays on topics that explore the dialectics between colonizer and colonized. The cultural decolonization does not build on the anti-colonial resistance but on the reverse of Eurocentrism and the re-establishment of the identities in the post-colonial discourses. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease are the pioneer of how Africa writes back. To “write back” is a way of response to the problematic discourses in mainstream literary tradition, so as to rethink the subjectivity in the discourse.