Between Realism and Modernism: Chinua Achebe and the Making of African Literature

This chapter discusses Chinua Achebe's seminal role in the foundation of modern African literature and his contribution to the culture of world letters in the second half of the twentieth century. Achebe started writing in the last years of British colonial rule in West Africa and in, his fictions, he sought to both understand the tragedy of colonial modernity, recuperate narratives of African life outside the colonialist idiom, and imagine a decolonized future. Using the English language against itself, Achebe adopted creative writing as a strategy of giving Africans a voice in the post-World War II order. And coming to writing at the end of modernism, Achebe would combine high modernist style with older forms of realism to create an idiom for understanding postcolonial societies, their failures and promises.