ABSTRACT
If Euro-Americans have used the creative writing of Afro-Americans primarily as evidence of the blacks’ mental or social ‘perfectibility’ or as a measure of the blacks’ ‘radical’ psychology or sociology, then they have used African literature as evidence of African ‘anthropology’, of traditional and modern African customs and beliefs. Chinua Achebe, more often than not, is taught in anthropology classes in America; at Cambridge in 1973, Wole Soyinka was neatly shunted away from the Faculty of English and appointed instead to the Faculty of Social Anthropology! If we were forced to compile a list of the received critical ‘fallacies’ that we wish to avoid in the analysis of black literature, the ‘anthropology’ fallacy would most certainly stand near the top of our list, perhaps just beneath the ‘perfectibility’ fallacy and the ‘sociology’ fallacy (that is, that blacks create literature primarily to demonstrate their intellectual equality with whites, or else to repudiate racism). The anthropology fallacy, moreover, can be divided into its two components, the ‘collective’ and ‘functional’ fallacies. (‘All African art is collective and functional’, whatever this is supposed to mean.) Our list could be extended to include all sorts of concerns with the possible functions of black texts in ‘non-literary’ arenas rather than with their internal structures as acts of language or their formal status as works of art.
