A Picture of Africa: Frenzy, Counternarrative, Mimesis

Abstract

This article completes a trilogy of essays that reexamine the quarrel between Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad from the angle of mimetic theory. Moving beyond the colonial/postcolonial binary, this essay focuses on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and argues that even with respect to the notion at the heart of the race quarrel (“frenzy”) striking mimetic continuities exist between colonial narratives and postcolonial counternarratives. Rather than adding new fire to what is already an incendiary debate, this essay articulates the narrative, anthropological, and discursive forces that have the power to generate counternarratives that are almost the opposite, but not quite.