Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow and Postcolonial Pedagogy

Abstract

The encyclopedic nature of Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow makes it an overt summing up of the author's previous work. At the same time, the novel explicitly positions itself as a break from what came before by rethinking the anticolonial ideologies contained in the earlier work in light of what Wizard of the Crow references as an expanding postcoloniality. This shift can be seen in the philosophy of pedagogy the novel puts forward. Unlike the radical oppositionality of the anticolonial stance, postcolonial pedagogy is depicted as contingent, conflicted, but because of its decentralized, nonhi - erarchical nature potentially better able to redefine the field of possibili - ties than a radicalization of the master's tools. Wizard of the Crow refuses to retreat from the intellectual's obligation to oppose and critique global exploitation and inequality, positioning postcolonialism not as an abandon- ment or surmounting of anticolonialism as much as a re-imagining of its goals in changed circumstances. The novel seeks to imagine a decolonizing form of education that can stand against without replicating patriarchy and colonial hierarchy.

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