Postcolonial Imaginations and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture

Eze (Northeastern Illinois Univ.) is aware of the many cultures of Africa, despite the title of his book, and he notes that the reader should acknowledge that Africa is not one monolithic culture. Eze takes issue with the delusion of Africa's racial innocence, a notion that has permeated world culture and literature and is largely due to Africa's violent encounters with Western powers. He asserts that there is a guilt-driven discourse in Africa and about Africa and seeks to challenge that. The text is divided into eight chapters. In chapter 1, Eze discusses the works of significant African writers and critics—Chinua Achebe, Moses Ebe Ochonu. In subsequent chapters he considers, among other things, the ideas of Edward Wilmot Blyden as a pioneer of pan-Negro thinkers in the West (and challenges many of Blyden's ideas, theories, and conclusions); the importance and monumental influence of Achebe's Things Fall Apart; and the role of the new African writers in regenerating the African mind. Readers with no knowledge of African literature, history, authors, and critics will find the book difficult to follow and understand. Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE *
In Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture, Chielozona Eze undertakes the ambitious task of charting a new philosophical pathway for African self-empowerment. The strength of his effort rests on two audaciously provocative interventions. The book’s rigorous analysis exposes the pitfalls of African cultural and literary discourses that thrive on the trope of victimhood and on the notion that morality and nobility are conferred by a history of foreign injury and oppression. Eze then posits a powerfully novel paradigm that moves African cultural discourses away from the politics and poetics of external culpability and blame and redirects them inward to scrutinize the possibilities and constraints of the African mind. Postcolonial Imagination provides a deft and lucid interrogation of an eclectic corpus of historical and contemporary texts, buttressing this analysis with an edifying rereading of familiar African classics from Achebe to Soyinka to Fanon. By summoning a vast repertoire of philosophical interpretation to complement his rich critique, Eze is able to craft a compelling argument for why any new projects of African cultural and political renaissance require a radical self-reflexivity that is missing from the existing African cultural, literary, and critical canons. -- Moses E. Ochonu, associate professor, Vanderbilt University
With Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture, Chielozona Eze makes an important and timely contribution to the urgent project of rethinking Africa. Abandoning the damaging tropes of victimhood and difference, the epistemologies of grievance and guilt and the reactionary stance of oppositionality, Eze joins key thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Simon Gikandi and Achille Mbembe in advancing new ways of approaching Africa that depart from both imperial and nativist imaginaries of it as either 'dark' or 'wounded' continent. Favouring interdependence over independence, transculturation over authenticity, contamination over purity and responsibility over innocence, Eze engages African worldliness, solicits expansive solidarities, embraces dissonance and calls for the cultivation of empathy and unsentimental love of the African space and person. Wide ranging in content as it explores Africa’s multilayered realities, this significant study helps to shift the debate on Africa in the direction in which we need to move. -- Meg Samuelson, Stellenbosch University
Chielozona Eze radically combines the deep reflections of a philosopher and the intellectual combativeness of an ambitious literary critic to call for the redemption—given contemporary Africa’s moral, political and cultural impasse—of what he aptly calls moral imaginations. Anyone who sees this book as apologia for western knowledge systems and values, or simply as rejection of the Africanist thought, totally misunderstands it. Postcolonial Imagination is, unabashedly, an indictment of reactionary postcolonial and nationalist ideas; a brilliant argument for the reinvention of African humanism for the twenty-first century and beyond. -- Chika Okeke-Agulu, Princeton University