Sunday, February 7, 2010

Wellesley College honours Achebe with three-day celebration

WELLESLEY College's Newhouse Centre for the Humanities and the office of the president hosts "Celebrating Chinua Achebe".

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It is three days of free readings, performances and scholarly events celebrating the work of Nigerian poet and novelist Chinua Achebe, one of the most important international figures in contemporary literature.

Winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for fiction, Achebe is best known for his novel, Things Fall Apart, the most widely read work of African fiction. Achebe will be delivering 2010 Wilson Lecture on Friday, March 5.

"Achebe inaugurated the modern African novel, and also illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking new words and forms for new realities and societies," says Elaine Showalter, literary scholar and 2007 Man Booker International Prize chair.

As Carol Dougherty, Director of the Newhouse Centre of the Humanities, notes, "The 50th anniversary of Achebe's novel, No Longer at Ease, has arrived at a critical time in politics and literature. Achebe and his writing have stood astride the crossroads of politics, literature, East and West since the publication of Things Fall Apart in 1959, and I am thrilled that the Newhouse Centre will host such a prominent group of artists and scholars as they take up the important questions raised by Achebe in his work over the course of the three-day celebration.

"We are so lucky that Prof. Achebe will be present among us so that we can learn from him, but also that we may honor him as he deserves."

These events are also sponsored by the Humanities Centre at Northeastern University.

Contemporary Nigerian fiction will be considered on Thursday March 4, 2010 at Clapp Library Lecture Room. It will be an evening of readings by contemporary Nigerian novelists Helon Habila and Sefi Atta, and moderated by Newhouse Visiting Professor of Creative Writing, Colin Channer.

The annual Wilson Lecture brings some of the most important voices in contemporary society to the Wellesley campus. Past lecturers have included the Honorable Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, environmentalist Bill McKibbon, and Lani Guinier, the first woman to receive tenure at Harvard Law School.

A symposium on No Longer at Ease 1960-2010: Literature, Politics, and the Challenges of Africa at the Crossroads will hold on March 6 at Collins Cinema.

Prof. Achebe has often described himself as a man of more than one tradition-African and Western, literary and political. This symposium takes the 50th anniversary of his 1960 novel, No Longer at Ease, as the point of departure for a multi-disciplinary investigation of African society-and its representation-in the aftermath of colonisation, war, liberation, a new wave of democratisation, and a new literature to grapple with it all.