Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe - Christopher Wise (essay date Fall 1999)
Christopher Wise (essay date Fall 1999)
SOURCE: “Excavating the New Republic: Post-Colonial Subjectivity in Achebe's Things Fall Apart,” in Callaloo, Vol. 22, No. 4, Fall, 1999, pp. 1054–70.
[In the following essay, Wise explores the universality of the plight of the Igbo people as they face the destruction of their pre-colonial culture in Things Fall Apart.]
“[I]t may be productive [today] to think in terms of a genuine transformation of being which takes place when the individual subject shifts from purely individual relations to that very different dynamic which is that of groups, collectives and communities … The transformation of being … is something that can be empirically experienced … by participation in group praxis—an experience no longer as rare as it was before the 1960s, but still rare enough to convey a genuine ontological shock, and the momentary restructuration and placing in a...
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