Fully (In)human: Spiritual Practice and Decolonial Human Subjectivity in Things Fall Apart
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This essay examines how spiritual practice contributes to the formation of non-Western human subjectivity in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Bridging Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to deconstruct Eurocentric modernity and Sylvia Wynter’s critique of overrepresented Man, I reveal how pre-colonial Igbo society presents an alternative ontology in which human subjects are inextricably entangled with spiritual and nonhuman worlds. Challenging Western secular modernity’s liberal model of the human, this novel worlds Igbo into a heterotemporal location that goes slantwise to the teleological temporality of Western modernity. Thus, Achebe invites decolonial thinking of the nature of the postcolonial human by foregrounding the pre-colonial spiritual subjectivity that conflicts with Western modern rationalist views of the human subject.
Abstract
This essay examines how spiritual practice contributes to the formation of non-Western human subjectivity in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Bridging Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to deconstruct Eurocentric modernity and Sylvia Wynter’s critique of overrepresented Man, I reveal how pre-colonial Igbo society presents an alternative ontology in which human subjects are inextricably entangled with spiritual and nonhuman worlds. Challenging Western secular modernity’s liberal model of the human, this novel worlds Igbo into a heterotemporal location that goes slantwise to the teleological temporality of Western modernity. Thus, Achebe invites decolonial thinking of the nature of the postcolonial human by foregrounding the pre-colonial spiritual subjectivity that conflicts with Western modern rationalist views of the human subject.