Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Armah, Ayi Kwei (Vol. 136) - K. Damodar Rao （essay date July 1994）

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K. Damodar Rao （essay date July 1994）

SOURCE: “Fictional Strategies of Ayi Kwei Armah,” in Literary Half-Yearly, Vol. 35, No. 2, July, 1994, pp. 104-21.

[In the following essay, Rao traces the fictional strategies in Armah's five novels and notes a change of tone in the author's latter two novels.]

Ayi Kwei Armah has emerged as a major writer on the African literary scene. The brilliant Ghanaian novelist is an articulate spokesman of African history and identity. Through a process of diagnosis/analysis of contemporary reality and reclamation/reconstruction of African history Armah, in his fictional medium, embarks on a course of restoration which at the same time serves as “an aggressive response to the colonialist theory of pre-colonial barbarism.”¹ Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist-revolutionary, while analysing the role of the native intellectual in the post-colonial context, formulates that the African...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. S. Nyamfukudza （review date 7 March 1980）
   2. Kofi Owusu （essay date Spring 1988）
   3. Ahmed Saber （essay date 1989）
   4. Taban lo Liyong （essay date 1991）
   5. Derek Wright （essay date 1991）
   6. Edward Sackey （essay date Autumn 1991）
   7. Adewale Maja-Pearce （essay date 1993）
   8. Ode S. Ogede （essay date April 1993）
   9. B. M. Ibitokun （essay date Spring/Fall 1993）
   10. Leif Lorentzon （essay date 1994）
   11. K. Damodar Rao （essay date July 1994）
   12. Chinyere Nwahunanya （essay date 1995）
   13. Paul R. Petrie （essay date Summer 1997）
   14. Samuel A. Dseagu （essay date 1998）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. African Literature