Gender and Feminism in Pre-colonial and Postcolonial Nigerian Literature: Reading, Achebe, Adichie, and Atta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For more than a century since British colonization of Nigeria (1914-1960), the voices of Nigerian women have largely been silent, both in Nigerian literature and in society. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), which is widely regarded as one of the literary works that ushered in modern Nigerian writing, provides evidence of the existence and types of patriarchal structures in pre-colonial contact Nigeria that silenced women. Achebe’s novel has influenced an entire generation of late twentieth century and twenty-first century Nigerian authors whose writings engage with female silence/silencing, and with Nigerian women’s resistance to that silencing, in the postcolonial period. This silence/silencing is a consequence of anti-woman norms embedded in both local Nigerian customs and traditions and in beliefs and practices held over from colonial times. In this paper, two of these contemporary Nigerian works—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come (2005) are compared with Things Fall Apart. Adichie’s and Atta’s novels are both set in the latter part of the twentieth century; and, when analyzed in tandem with Achebe’s, they offer an exploration of the ways in Chowdhury-Mohammad 4 which the combination of Nigerian customs and the remnants of British colonial influence impact on Nigerian women’s ability to make themselves heard. For the analysis of the novels, this paper draws on writings of notable postcolonial and feminist theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the writings of “Third World” theorists such as Gayatri Spivak to contextualize the discussion of female silence/silencing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".