Constructions of self and community in the contemporary Nigerian-Biafran war novel

• Main Author: Krishnan, Madhu
• Published: University of Nottingham 2012
• Subjects: 823.92
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.580151

This thesis examines three novels written by authors of Nigerian Igbo descent: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004) and Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2005). Focusing upon the strategies through which each novel engages with the legacy of the Nigerian-Biafran War (1967-1970) as a means of reconstituting individual and collective identifications, this study seeks to redefine canonical notions surrounding identity-formation and identification in postcolonial studies, as well as provide a textually-driven examination of the contemporary Nigerian literary landscape which balances a discursive approach to the text with historical and material contextualization. The introduction to this study provides an overview of nation and identification in postcolonial studies, the Nigerian national context and the current field of literary criticism on contemporary Nigerian literature. Chapter 1 focuses on racial identification, deploying Fanon' s schema of racial alienation and its subsequent legacy in postcolonial studies. Chapter 2 examines the intersection of gendered identifications in the postcolonial context of Adichie's, Abani's and Iweala's texts. Chapter 3 moves from the micro- to macro-levels of the text, examining the use of language-as-rhetoric in each core text, focusing particularly on the tropes of literacy, writing and the book. Chapter 4 then considers the means through which mythopoetics are redeployed in these texts through narrative blending, double consciousness and the often-contentious concepts of magical realism and hybridity. The study concludes with a coda which considers the intersection of aesthetics and ethics in representations of African conflict.