The critical inheritance of community in Nigerian literature: Tutuola, Achebe, Obioma, Atta

This thesis is an invitation to reconsider community as a critical and shifting register of the African
literary experience, focusing on its emergent and multivalent articulation in postcolonial
Anglophone Nigerian literature from the 1950s to the present day. Examining the works of Amos
Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Chigozie Obioma, and Sefi Atta, the project draws attention to the ways
in which the novel form has actively responded to, and participated in, the critical inheritance of
community. The thesis locates itself at the heart of a debate that has been formative in the
development of African cultural and literary productions; namely, the perceived rift between
“tradition” and “modernity,” and the exemplification of this divide in the novel, the form of
literary modernity. Discussions of community in African literature tend to position community,
along with tradition, as that which is lost in the transition to modernity. One of the key
interventions of the thesis is to show, in contrast, how community is, in fact, that which is critically
produced in the processes of change. In brief, my thesis poses the following question: if the loss
of community mediates the literary experience of modernity, how might the literary re-creation of
community mediate alternative visions of modernity? Taking inspiration from the works of
Raymond Williams and Emmanuel Eze, among others, the thesis argues that a dialectical approach
identifies the pressure points at which newer ideas of community emerge that are auto-critical of
community’s instrumental attachment to nostalgic or monolithic iterations. The thesis explores
how the fictions in question instantiate such conceptual alternatives. Ultimately, an emphasis on
the dialectical refuses false binaries and opens up interpretive avenues for African futures that are
otherwise foreclosed by narratives of rupture and despair.