12/2/25
Things Fall Apart - Lecture 2
● Achebe writes TFA to counter colonialist and racist views of Africa that often
appeared ‘objective’ or quasi-scientific.
● TFA offers a subjective, locally informed account of colonisation that allows readers
to experience both the loss of Igbo Culture and the effect of its recovery.
● TFA is a recovery of the experiential time of colonisation.
Formal Decolonisation
● Decolonisation - a political process where a colonised nation achieves some kind of
independence from the Imperial nation occupying the nation.
● Decolonisation is a matter of governance and authority. A sense of self-
determination.
● Mediation of how the materiality of the world is articulated by our attempt to represent
it.
● Articulation and perception and how language divides the world into particular units
of meaning.
● Colonialism as a mode of exportation which would have not been successful
without the support of representation and cultural representations. The full realm of
cultural production.
Colonial Epistemology
● Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism: ‘Neither imperialism or colonialism is a
simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even
impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain
territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of
knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic 19th century imperial
culture is plentiful with such words and concepts as ‘inferior’ or ‘subject races’,
‘subordinate peoples’, ‘dependency’, ‘expansion’ and ‘authority’.
● Said points out the legitimation work that culture has performed in order to uphold a
colonial vision of the world. There is an intimate relationship between culture and
imperialism.
● Culture enables us to interrogate representations of power and authority of the
dominant mode.
● The production of knowledge has a very central role in the business of colonial
exploitation and colonial relations. Language is complicit in the perpetuation of
certain kinds of values.
● Episteme = mode of knowledge / system or structure of knowledge (a way of
seeing).
● Epistemological = Pertaining to knowledge.
● The scholarship of Edward Said has focused upon the ways in which colonialism
has functioned in what we might call epistemologically productive. Colonialism is
used to generate forms of knowledge to legitimate and naturalise the aims and
ambitions of colonial exploitation.
Things Fall Apart - Lecture 2
● Achebe writes TFA to counter colonialist and racist views of Africa that often
appeared ‘objective’ or quasi-scientific.
● TFA offers a subjective, locally informed account of colonisation that allows readers
to experience both the loss of Igbo Culture and the effect of its recovery.
● TFA is a recovery of the experiential time of colonisation.
Formal Decolonisation
● Decolonisation - a political process where a colonised nation achieves some kind of
independence from the Imperial nation occupying the nation.
● Decolonisation is a matter of governance and authority. A sense of self-
determination.
● Mediation of how the materiality of the world is articulated by our attempt to represent
it.
● Articulation and perception and how language divides the world into particular units
of meaning.
● Colonialism as a mode of exportation which would have not been successful
without the support of representation and cultural representations. The full realm of
cultural production.
Colonial Epistemology
● Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism: ‘Neither imperialism or colonialism is a
simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even
impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain
territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of
knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic 19th century imperial
culture is plentiful with such words and concepts as ‘inferior’ or ‘subject races’,
‘subordinate peoples’, ‘dependency’, ‘expansion’ and ‘authority’.
● Said points out the legitimation work that culture has performed in order to uphold a
colonial vision of the world. There is an intimate relationship between culture and
imperialism.
● Culture enables us to interrogate representations of power and authority of the
dominant mode.
● The production of knowledge has a very central role in the business of colonial
exploitation and colonial relations. Language is complicit in the perpetuation of
certain kinds of values.
● Episteme = mode of knowledge / system or structure of knowledge (a way of
seeing).
● Epistemological = Pertaining to knowledge.
● The scholarship of Edward Said has focused upon the ways in which colonialism
has functioned in what we might call epistemologically productive. Colonialism is
used to generate forms of knowledge to legitimate and naturalise the aims and
ambitions of colonial exploitation.
