Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-b6zl4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-05T14:12:44.319Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Imaginative Knowledge: Scottish Readers and Nigerian Fictions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2022

Andrew Smith
Andrew Smith*
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Get access

Extract

I must admit that my initial reaction on seeing the book was a sinking feeling. I felt that of all the books chosen that was the one I really had no inclination whatsoever to read. It may sound insular, but I am not interested in Africa.

This paper is based upon the responses of a group of Scottish readers to Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). For almost all of the readers this represented their first encounter with African fiction. As the preceding quotation makes clear, it was not one that they had solicited and for some at least, it was not one that they relished.

The encounter came about as part of a pre-access course taught under the auspices of the Adult Education Department of Glasgow University. The course ran on two occasions in Stranraer and on one occasion in the Gorbals, a residential area on the south side of the Clyde.

Type
Reading and Readership in West Africa
Information
African Research and Documentation , Volume 83 , 2000 , pp. 23 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

All quotations from student essays are presented as received. Any emphasis is added.Google Scholar
The pre-access course run by the Department of Adult and Continuing Education at Glasgow offers a series of short classes from various subject areas and is intended as an introduction for students who are planning to apply for the University entrance access course. It is worth making clear at this stage that there was no assessment or grading on the course, and that there was no certificate or mark to be gained at the end of it.Google Scholar
See Thomas, 1994, chapter 5.Google Scholar
O.E.D. 1961, p. 561. My thanks to Ruth Madigan who initially drew my attention to this parallel. No doubt William Booth was drawing attention to something of the same parallel when he titled his famous attack on the condition of the working class In Darkest England and the Way Out. The reference, of course, is to H. M. Stanley's colonial travelogue: In Darkest Africa.Google Scholar
I will just briefly mention the constitution of the group. I received 18 essays from Stranraer (12 female, 6 male) and 4 from the Gorbals (3 female, 1 male). The average age of the first group (56) reflected the fact that most of those there were retired although the range was between 30 and late seventies. The much smaller group from the Gorbals was also notably younger, with an average age in the early thirties. My information on the respondents comes from a short background questionnaire which they were generous enough to fill out, and from the more informal conversations we had over the eight weeks of each course.Google Scholar
‘The efforts in question [Brecht here is referring to the ‘A-effect’ in Chinese theatre] were directed to playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on the conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious’ in Selden, 1988, pp. 66-67.Google Scholar
This is, of course, an extremely brief summary of a idea that has a long history and has aroused much debate. It hardly needs reference to Benjamin, Gramsci or to Lukacs, to Althusser's state apparatus etc, etc, to demonstrate the depth of discussion on culture's ideological lode. It is worth noting that Marx's original conception was never that culture was simply an expression of the material base, but that the formation of cultural items is itself enacted in the basic commodity production of capitalism. Culture is both reflective of, and simultaneously part of the material basis of the social order, both mirror to, and embedded in the dominant form of productive relations.Google Scholar
See Booth, 1981, pp. 66-73.Google Scholar
I use Albert Lord's terminology here as his description in The Singer of Tales examines a very similar process.Google Scholar
Ibid. p. 73.Google Scholar
There is a good reprise of the debate in Moore-Gilbert, 1997, chapter 2. See also the well-known attack by Ahmad 1992, chapter 6. Said's own re-appraisal of Orientalism (available in Moore-Gilbert et al. 1997) and later work including Culture and Imperialism 1993 are important texts here.Google Scholar
See Bhabha's discussion in the introductory and eponymous essay in Locations of Culture (1994), especially pp. 9-18. Also, Kristeva, 1988, chapter 8.Google Scholar
See Shlovsky in Lemon and Reis, (eds.) 1965.Google Scholar
Said, Orientalism Reconsidered, in Moore-Gilbert et al., 1997.Google Scholar
‘Fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality; creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of the modern nation.’ Anderson, 1991, p. 36.Google Scholar
See Ahmad, op. cit. and also 1995. Malik, 1996 and Dirlik, 1994.Google Scholar
I borrow this phrase, somewhat against its intention, from Althusser, 1984, p. 6Google Scholar
See especially At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. 1997.Google Scholar
Fanon, 1973, p. 9Google Scholar
Reading Things Fall Apart this way would, among other things, provide an answer to the charge of a critic like Benedict Ibitokun who states: ‘I find Okonkwo's suicide escapist and gratuitous … True heroes are those who stay behind to face the realities of the time.’ (1991, p.419).Google Scholar
The degree to which Africa - and increasingly the Middle East - remains a site of mass cultural stereotype cannot be underestimated. If these figures are less likely to be found in works of literature now, they still make continual appearances as the silent or comic backdrops in Hollywood popcorn movies like The Mummy and in other, less often examined cultural commodities such as computer and role-playing games.Google Scholar
See Bourdieu 1993, especially chapter 1 for the author's theoretical exposition of the term.Google Scholar
For reasons of space I cannot discuss the possibility that this homology has a specific aspect. That is to say that Scottish readers, particularly in the context of the popular revival of Scottish nationalism, might see themselves as subjects in a colonised nation and read Things Fall Apart through this lens. Suffice it to mention that in a tutorial on the politics of mineral extraction in the Niger delta there were, in both groups, a number of voluntary parallels made to the perceived theft of Scottish oil from the North Sea.Google Scholar

Works cited

Achebe, C. 1958. Things Fall Apart. Oxford: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Ahmad, A. 1992. In Theory: classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Ahmad, A. 1995. ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality’, Race and Class 36 (3), 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Althusser, L. 1984. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Brennan, T. 1997. At Home in the World: cosmopolitanism now. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Brennan, T. 1989. ‘Cosmopolitans and Celebrities’, Race and Class 31 (1), 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Booth, J. 1981. Writers and Politics in Nigeria. London: Hodder and Staughton.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: essays on art and literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. 1996. The Rules of Art. London: Polity Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanon, F. 1965. The Wretched of the Earth. London: MacGibbon and Kee.Google Scholar
Dirlik, A. 1994. ‘The Postcolonial Aura: third world criticism in the age of global capitalism’, Critical Inquiry, 20 (Winter), 328–356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moore-Gilbert, B. 1997. Postcolonial Theory: contexts, practices, politics. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Moore-Gilbert, B. et al. 1997. Postcolonial Criticism. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman.Google Scholar
Ginzburg, C. 1980. The Cheese and the Worms: the cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Ibitokun, B. 1991. ‘The Dynamics of Spatiality in African Fiction’, Modern Fiction Studies, 37 (3), 409–426.Google Scholar
Kristeva, J. 1991. Strangers to ourselves. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Lemon, L. and Reis, M. 1965. Russian Formalist Criticism: four essays. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Malik, K. 1996. ‘Universalism and Difference: Race and the Postmodernists’, Race and Class, 37 (3), 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lord, A. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Said, E. 1990. ‘Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture’, Raritan, 9 (3), 27–50.Google Scholar
Said, E. 1991. Orientalism: Western conceptions of the orient: London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Said, E. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: VintageGoogle Scholar
Selden, R. (ed). 1988. The Theory of Criticism: from Plato to the present. Harlow: LongmanGoogle Scholar
Thomas, N. 1994. Colonialism's Culture: anthropology, travel and government. Cambrige: Polity Press.Google Scholar