31 pages • 1 hour read
Chinua AchebeDead Men’s Path
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Further Reading: Literature
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
This classic novel of English-language modern African fiction is considered Achebe’s masterpiece and comprises the first part of his African Trilogy, along with No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). Things Fall Apart addresses the same problem of Tradition Versus Modernity seen in “Dead Men’s Path” by exploring the impact of European colonization on an Igbo village, tracing life from the precolonial to the colonial period.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
This provocative tale is at once damning of colonization’s horrors while simultaneously repeating many of the Orientalist stereotypes and tropes that can be found throughout Western fiction about Africa. Achebe cited this novel as one of his main motivations for writing about Africa, as he wanted to share more realistic and nuanced depictions of Africans.
Further Reading: Beyond Literature (Nonfiction)
Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
This book is a quintessential study of how Europeans harnessed art, literature, and science in the service of imperial projects through the use of stereotypes about the “Oriental Other.” This book revolutionized the study of postcolonial literature and its impact on the humanities and social sciences continues to this day. While focused specifically on imperialist impacts on Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, many of the concepts raised in Orientalism can be applied to other postcolonial nations. This includes Western literature that flattens Indigenous people and history as “exotic,” “primitive,” and “unchanging.” This lens is useful for understanding both Achebe’s colonial and postcolonial writing.
“The African Writer and the English Language” by Chinua Achebe (1975)
In this essay, Achebe maps out his image of a “new” English that is capable of expressing the African experience through the use of Indigenous sayings, language, and syntax. This type of writing taps into oral storytelling traditions, for example, and produces a more authentic African voice in English language literature.
"An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness" (1988)
Adapted from a speech given in 1975, this critical essay challenges the classic tale of colonial horrors by Joseph Conrad, revealing it to have racist underpinnings that previous critics overlooked or ignored.
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986)
This book-length study, part autobiography and part postcolonial criticism, is comprised of essays that respond to and, in a sense, rebut Achebe’s defense of using English as an African language. Thiong’o believes that writing in English furthered the colonization of Africa in the past and continues to support the neocolonial in the present.
Related Titles
By Chinua Achebe
