Burying the Dead: The Postcolonial Strategies of Achebe and Naipaul

Abstract

Mapping out a successful postcolonial strategy/response for the ‘native intellectual’ is a worthwhile endeavour in this global era, especially as the postcolonial subject is bombarded with countless Western-based theories that emphasize ‘fragmented’ or ‘floating’ identities, which occupy an ambiguous space. This paper will examine the strategies undertaken by two current postcolonial writers, V.S. Naipaul and Chinua Achebe, who have negotiated for themselves ideologically opposed strategies, which as I will argue, represent radically different psychological states of development on the part of the two writers as evidenced by their work. Frantz Fanon’s ideas on the development of the ‘native intellectual’ will be used to help bring the psyches of these two writers into sharper focus..