ACHEBE AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

Cultural Nationalism has traditionally been take as being as plain as day in Achebe's earliest fictional narratives upon which the attention of readers has obsessively been focused. but Ode Ogede calls this powerful view into question. Ogede introduces readers first to the irony of the fact that in these early works Achece depended upon satires and tragedy- conventions of narrative borrowed from Europe- for his quest to reverse Western assumptions about Africans. He then re-appraises the connection between aesthetics and ideology in Things Fall Apart, Achebe's most famous first novel, which he examines alongside Achebe's lesser known early works of fiction, concluding that we may no longer continue to take commitment for granted in Achebe's early fiction. While arguing that it is ironic that the shortcomings of these imitative texts lies in their defining sources of energy, particularly their reliance upon the poetics of Aristotelian tragedy, tracing the evolution of the entire path of