AfricaBib 
bibliographic database
| Previous page | New search |
The free AfricaBib App for Android is available here
 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
 WorldCat |
| Title: | Metonymic eruptions: Igbo novelists, the narrative of the nation, and new developments in the contemporary Nigerian novel |
| Author: | Nwakanma, Obi |
| Year: | 2008 |
| Periodical: | Research in African Literatures |
| Volume: | 39 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Pages: | 1-14 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Nigeria |
| Subjects: | writers Igbo national identity |
| External link: | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v039/39.2.nwakanma.pdf |
| Abstract: | Nigeria's postcolonial nationality has been marked by disjunctions that continue to highlight its character, as a product of the colonial will, and of what Biodun Jeyifo has articulated as 'arrested decolonization', the basis of its problematic modernity. Nigeria is, in its current formation, a hybrid State; a nation of multiple nations coalescing to form the basis of nationness and national belonging. One of the fundamental sources of its evolution is to be found in its literature, particularly in poetry, that most nationalist of genres, but significantly also, in the form of the novel, which constitutes much of the narrative of nation. Modern Nigerian literature can now be categorized in three to four movements, or generations, starting with the Azikiwe/Osadebe generation of nationalist poets, to the late modernists Achebe, Okigbo, Soyinka, etc., to the current generation or category of writers whose writings encompass the new attitudes, desires, values, and anxieties of the postcolonial nation. In this paper, the author specifically examines the intriguing presence or overwhelming prominence of Igbo novelists writing in English, whose works are currently defining the canon of contemporary Nigerian national literature. The author claims the implicit value of Igbo travelling identity in the formation of the modern State as providing the cultural and historical factors, stimulus or circumstances that animate this literature. The nature of the Igbo travelling identity - its cosmopolitanism, transborder claims, and new metropolitan tropes - permits us to fully comprehend the nature of Nigeria's contemporary cultural production as well as its significance in shaping modern, postcolonial Nigerian identity and the direction of its narrative of the nation. Bibliogr., sum. [Journal abstract] |
