Episode 39: Things Fall Apart

We recorded this episode before the police murder of George Floyd and before the nationwide protests against structural racism and police terror. We stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with all those fighting against white supremacism, capital, and the carceral state.

This week, we take up a novel that deals with one specific scene in the long history of empire and anti-Black violence. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) concerns the early years of Britain’s formal colonization of what is now Nigeria. But it is also a story of precolonial Igbo society and culture, modernity, and one man’s damaging and obsessive masculinism. We talk anti-colonialism, race, paternity, gender, psychoanalysis, and ludicrous colonial uniforms.

Penguin Classics has a very good deluxe edition that includes all of the African Trilogy -- Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God. For more on Achebe, his contexts, and ongoing debates in his critical reception, check out Jago Morrison’s Chinua Achebe from Manchester University Press.

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