Abstract

In this article I argue that Nigerian author Chinua Achebe ostentatiously co-opted Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ in the title of his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart to mobilize a modernist gesture in order to bookend what is in fact primarily a rehearsal of markers of modernity (realist narration, the structure of the historical novel as defined by Lukács). The latter rehearsal was central to Achebe’s claim for the fully-fledged rationalist character of the Igbo polity and his bid to put his society on a par with European modernity. Crucial to this claim for parity, however, was Achebe’s countervailing manipulation of residual markers of modernism to force a wedge into the monolith of modernity so as to disable those elements of modernity that disqualified African societies from parity with Europe, as against those elements that were desired as offering parity. By the same token, Achebe’s ‘countermodernism’ also foregrounds other versions of history that resonate with global alter-modernisms and thus posits alternative modernities.

摘要

在这篇文章中，我认为尼日利亚作家 Chinua Achebe 在他 1958 年的小说《事情分崩离析》的标题中炫耀地采用了叶芝的诗《第二次降临》。调动一种现代主义的姿态，以结束实际上主要是对现代性标记（现实主义叙事，卢卡奇定义的历史小说的结构）的排练。后者的演练是阿契贝声称伊博政体具有成熟的理性主义特征以及他试图将他的社会与欧洲现代性相提并论的核心。然而，对这种平等主张至关重要的是，阿契贝对现代主义的残余标记进行了反补贴操作，以迫使现代性的巨石形成一个楔子，从而使那些使非洲社会无法与欧洲平等的现代性元素失效，而不是那些在希望作为提供平价。出于同样的原因，