ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the use of ethnicity in the exploration of social subjectivities in selected African novels and memoirs published since the turn of the twenty-first century. In Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity, Mahmood Mamdani provides a particularly insightful exploration of the ways in which the identities of indigenous African peoples became invested with enduring political force by colonial divide-and-conquer policies. Achebe’s earlier novels are among the most iconic works of the so-called first generation of African literatures in English. As noted one of the key features of the transnational, postmodernist and late postcolonial contexts within African literatures is the protean nature, not only of subject hood but also of processes of narration. The analysis to follow demonstrates the multiple and ambivalent ways in which textualizations of indigenous African ethnic referents dramatize different forms of consciousness produced in different cultural contexts.
