Things Fall Apart and Wide Sargasso Sea: Revisiting Spirit, Rewriting Canon

Abstract

My second chapter speaks to the value of bringing spiritually interventionist readings to texts that are typically framed in culturally ethnographic and/or nationalist ways. It begins by examining the ways in which these two early postcolonial texts are constrained by the discourses of cultural nationalism, and use Igbo and Afro-Caribbean spirituality for the explicitly didactic purpose of re-writing colonial texts Heart of Darkness (1902) and Jane Eyre (1847). Although the spiritual traditions presented in these works are more overtly constrained by the cultural nationalism of their authors’ projects, my reading of their novels opens them up to an entirely different sense of time, space and being than that reflected in Eurocentric epistemologies.