Postcolonialism in Things Fall Apart

Wow, it has been a while since the last blog. I almost forgot how fun blogging is! I am really excited to get into this prewrite blog!

Having discussed both the postcolonial and feminist perspectives, I believe I am going to choose the postcolonial theory to use as a lens for analyzing the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. While both the postcolonial and feminist theories can be applied to this novel very well, I am much more intrigued by the postcolonial theory.

A few quotes we went over in class really caught my interest. Such as “Likewise, the assumption that Western Europeans, and in particular, the British people, were biologically superior to any other race – a term for a class of people based on physical, cultural distinctions, or both – remained relatively unquestioned.” This idea is very present in Things Fall Apart, as the Ibo culture was subjected to this lower position in society. I am going to talk about the social inequality found throughout the novel, as well as how the people are subjected to their social norm. In other words, how a person’s place in society was determined. I am also going to link this into the idea of how they “are excluded from positions of power and viewed as different and inferior.”

Another idea I will use will be that “Great Britain, the chief imperialist power of the nineteenth century , dominated her colonies, making them produce and then give up their countries’ raw materials in exchange for what material goods the colonized desired or were made to believe their desired by the colonizers”. This quote touches on how Great Britain herself thought that they were better and therefore more important than the colonies. Therefore, it was ok for them to utilize the colonies in any way they seem fit and that instilling their ideas was for the better of the people.