REPRESENTATION OF THE ORIENT: A RE-ORIENTALIST STUDY OF CHINUA ACHEBE’S SELECTED FICTION

Abstract

The research deals with the representation of African people in Achebe’s selected novel as majority of the countries were occupied by different powers mainly America, England and France. These countries make colonies of them there and also colonized the natives. This was the folded agenda of them to rob the lands politically, ethically, socially and economically. It’s after effects were also so much terrible that the natives become slaves of them. They start to consider the natives as inferior being. In the world of literature, natives were being portrayed in a wrong way of them and the colonizers as right. Many writers also resisted the concept through their writings including ChinuaAchebe, Maya Angelo, GayatriSpivak etc. this particular term paper discusses the concept of re-orientalism in two major works of Chinua Achebe that is “Things Fall Apart” and the lectures which he has delivered in the Harvard university named as “Home and Exile” in favor of his nation and country to depict the true face of colonizers but on the other part the writer also uses the orientalists style of writing to represent the African people and degenerated and distorted. The research shows the misrepresentation of the African people in the selected novels which are similar to Orientalism, using the re-orientalist lens of Lau (2009).