Representing Africa - Essay Example

Representing Africa Diverse cultural practices accelerate power and politics of representing Africa. Readings of Things Fall Apart supports power representation outside Africa by majoring on African teachings and colonialism. The book sustains the interest of delusional ethical claims in contemporary African culture. Many literary articles comprise enormous impact of Things Fall Apart on the African postcolonial culture and discussion (Eze 41). Things Fall Apart rightfully challenges western hegemonic discussions and successfully twisted African responses to the west.

In Simon Gikandi’s essay, “Chinua Achebe, and the invention of African culture,” he highlights Achebe’s roles in Africa’s intellectual history. Achebe works have had tremendous acknowledgements on the institutions of pedagogy and interpretation. Things Fall Apart gives largely abstract ideas and impulses on the human face (Eze 42). Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness depicts racism. The novel attacks European imperialism. Chinua Achebe anatomizes racist assumptions in the novel description of Africa and Africans in an article research in African literatures.

The arguments of Achebe depict Conrad as a “bloody racist.” He argues on Conrad’s ideas with three main points. Landscape solidifies mixtures of stillness and unreasonable arguments of Africans to the Europeans. Heart of Darkness is neither about Africa nor about colonialism, but arguments of Europeans minds and chaos buried in any European mind. Moreover, Achebe acknowledges that the attitude in Heart of Darkness does not originate from Conrad’s ideas but his fictional narrator Marlow.

Additionally, Conrad holds it up to criticism and irony. Said argues that there is connection between “the discourse of resurgent empire” and Conrad’s first version Heart of Darkness. Furthermore, ideological shifts are within domains of high theory, which depicts power represented outside Africa. Said do not draw fundamental connection between developments but clearly thinks that politics and philosophy of anti-imperialist decolonization are part of the same event. His views on disenchantment of western intellectuals with narratives of emancipation are another side of nostalgia for empire.

Enlistment of Salman Rushdie and marshaling of George Orwell together with Samuel Beckett illustrates second line of visualization in Heart of Darkness. In the vision, Conrad’s intellectual honesty outruns prejudice as he gives himself realities that are not accessible to imperial gaze. Said suggest that honesty is self-conscious and intentional. Tayeb Salih, in his book, Season of Migration to the North, depicts undecided ending to disrupt the neat progression from academic faith to religious translation.

The book writes back to colonial conversations of masculinity, orientalist typecasts of hectic-sexualised Arabs and European suspicions of black Africans. This projects high political differences between Africans and Europeans. Fanon Frantz on identity and nation building argues that durability of strategic association among Africans and in the Diaspora depends on the final promise of conflicts in sustainable forms of politics, dialogue, and identity. Politics of representing Africa depends on the ethno-cultural identities and overlooking noticeable facts.

Private power remains dominant the preserve of whites and liberal democratic institutions to represent white power. Works citedChielozona Eze: Postcolonial Imaginations And Moral Representations In African Literature And Culture: Lexington Books, 2011.Print. 178 Pages