The pitfalls of cultural consciousness

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Periodical article

Title:	The pitfalls of cultural consciousness
Author:	Eze, Chielozona
Year:	2007
Periodical:	Philosophia Africana: Analysis of Philosophy and Issues in Africa and the Black Diaspora
Volume:	10
Issue:	1
Pages:	37-47
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Africa
Subjects:	ethics stereotypes literature
About person:	Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (1930-2013)
Abstract:	The author argues that Chinua Achebe's 'Things fall apart' (Oxford, 1958) and 'Arrow of God' (New York, 1989) may not be the anti or postcolonial intellectual panaceas to Africa's colonial problems that many critics have come to assume they are. The author wonders whether it is possible to imagine that both works initiate, extol and promote - even in their challenge to European discourse and the demands of national allegorization - an ambiguous cultural existentialistic ethic: an ethics 'ressentiment'. He shows in what ways the morality of 'ressentiment' appears to apply to certain strands in postcolonial African philosophy. In particular, he shows that a postcolonial attachment to the ethics of 'ressentiment' can be noticed in the guise of theories of cultural relativism and that, in modern African discourse, one could in fact trace some hints of a 'ressentiment'-induced relativism back to the philosophies of Edward Wilmot Blyden and Leopold Sedar Senghor. Bibliogr., notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]