De/crowning the intellectual: Power, representation, and epistemic shifts in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)

Abstract

The current study investigates the representation of the intellectual and power dynamics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The novel discusses the repressed history of the Nigerian civil war, which resulted in the insidious genocidal murders of the Igbo minority. Moreover, ideological consciousness is embargoed by evicting intellectuals from their homes as they are a threat to the neo-colonialist strategy to dominate Nigeria politically and economically. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialectics of “de/crowning”, the study finds that Adichie deconstructs the conventional hierarchy of epistemological power, whereby the traditional intellectual, emblematized in the professor of mathematics and political activist Odenigbo, fails to maintain his status as a public intellectual. Simultaneously, the illiterate servant, Ugwu, emerges as the representative of the voiceless by becoming a novice writer/public intellectual. In a nutshell, the study underscores Adichie’s criticism of the elitists for failing to engage in the political calamity that befalls the Igbo group while introducing an unprecedented alternative to the elitist intellectual, characterizing Ugwu as an author whose book universalizes the Biafran crisis and humanizes its victims.