Postcolonial approaches to historical fiction typically focus on questions of representation, epistemology, and discursive struggles over the right to narrate. While these are often illuminating, they tend to privilege a ‘resistance’ model that sees novelists as pitting themselves against metropolitan authority to rewrite ‘History’ as anticolonial ‘histories’. In this paper I complicate this model by placing some well-known examples of Nigerian historical fiction (Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)) in dialogue with one of the most canonical of nineteenth-century European novels – Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865-68). By showing how conceptual, narratological and aesthetic problems raised by Tolstoy resonate with the later Nigerian texts we can rethink both postcolonial and postmodern approaches to historical fiction. A critical analysis informed by the historical aesthetic criticism of thinkers like Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin can illuminate novels like Adichie’s and offer a searching literary and historical account of the neo-colonial domination she uncovers. I propose an understanding of historical fiction as a genre uniquely engaged with experiential and conceptual dimensions of modernity, one that strives to imagine what a meaningful account of the past might look like. In this paper I introduce some of the theoretical concerns that inform my PhD research on postcolonial historical fiction and test the applicability of an expanded temporal and geographical framework for the analysis of literary texts.

 

Hamish Dalley is a third-year PhD student in the School of Cultural Inquiry, Research School of Humanities and the Arts. His research examines contemporary postcolonial historical fiction from Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand.