Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T07:15:57.415Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Comparative Postcolonialisms: Storytelling and Community in Sholem Aleichem and Chinua Achebe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Ato Quayson
Ato Quayson*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper compares Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. Despite all their obvious differences in terms of cultural traditions and historical moments, the two authors’ fundamental commitment to modes of storytelling allows us to draw parallels and counterpoints between them. In both works storytelling is shaped by the essential polysemy of orality (such as the collocation of proverbs, gnomic statements, and anecdotes as crucial aspects of the stories being told), as well as an orientation toward ritual (in terms of the formal repetition of storytelling motifs and devices). In the Tevye stories, the first-person narration is addressed to various explicit and implied addressees and gives the impression of an immediate orality, whereas in Arrow of God the third-person narrator is coextensive with the one we encounter in Things Fall Apart in its quasi-ethnographic orientation. In both texts, storytelling and orality are mediums for identifying with an imagined community. Imagined implies a nonideal relationship to existing communities, something that is made clear in the agonistic infrastructure of the two central characters’ minds. The paper argues for seeing this agonistic infrastructure as a form of “contexture,” that is to say, a way to provide texture to the historical contexts in which they were written and to which their referential relays point us to.

Keywords

mental infrastructureagonismoralitySholem AleichemChinua Achebecontexturehistory
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 3 , Issue 1: Jewish Studies and Postcolonialism , January 2016 , pp. 55 - 77
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. London: Heinemann, 1958.Google Scholar
Aleichem, Sholem. Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories. Translated with an introduction by Hillel Halkin. New York: Schocken Books, 1987.Google Scholar
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature. London: Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers. London: Faber, 1959.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Giving and Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caplan, Mark. How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip. “Slavery and Empire.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977): 3–11.Google Scholar
Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dymshits, Valery. “The Return of Menachem Mendel: Sholem Aleichem as a Political Commentator.” Eastern European Jewish Affairs, 43.1 (2013): 31–42.Google Scholar
Genette, Gerrard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Hechter, Michael. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975.Google Scholar
Holquist, Michael. “A New Tour of Babel: Recent Trends Linking Comparative Literature Departments, Foreign Language Departments, and Area Studies Programs.” ADFL Bulletin 27.1 (1995): 6–12.Google Scholar
Howe, Stephen. Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Kenny, Kevin, ed. “The Irish in the Empire.” In Ireland and the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 90–122.Google Scholar
Kobner, Richard. Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Lionnet, Francoise and Shih, Shu-mei, eds. “Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally.” In Minor Transnationalism, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Miron, Dan. From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Mufti, Aamir. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36.3 (2010): 458–493.Google Scholar
Mufti, Aamir. “Erich Auerbach and the Death and Life of World Literature.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, Djelal Kadir. London: Routledge, 2013.Google Scholar
Ponzanezi, Sandra. The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies. London: Palgrave, 2014.Google Scholar
Quayson, Ato. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Quayson, Ato “Kobolo Poetics: Urban Transcripts and their Reading Publics in Africa.” New Literary History 41 (2010): 413–438.Google Scholar
Quayson, Ato “The Journal of Commonwealth Literature: the 1980s.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50th Anniversary Issue 50.3 (2015): 1–18.Google Scholar
Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Oxford: Fahamu and Pambazuka Press, 1972, 2012.Google Scholar
Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Sommer, Doris. Proceed with Caution, When Engaged with Minority Writing in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Stern, Michael, “Tevye’s Art of Quotation.” Prooftexts 6.1 (1986): 79–96.Google Scholar
Wehler, Hans-Urlich. The German Empire, 1871–1918. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1997.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Wisse Ruth, R. The Modern Jewish Canon: A Journey through Literature and Culture. New York: The Free Press, 2000.Google Scholar