Ben Okri, In Arcadia

Christopher Ringrose (University of Northampton)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 8.2.3: Anglophone African Writing and Culture: Subsaharan.
Vol. editors: Helen Rachel Cousins (Newman University), David Firth (University of Manchester)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2002

Places

Nigeria (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

In Arcadia (2002) marks out Ben Okri as a transnational writer, in the sense in which the term has been proposed by Andreas Huyssen. Huyssen sees the concept of transnationalism as a way of overcoming the false dichotomy between the local and the global, counteracting and complicating the “argument that only local culture or culture as local is good, authentic and resistant, whereas global cultural forms must be condemned as manifestations of cultural imperialism, i.e., Americanization” (13). In In Arcadia, Lao, an intellectual, celebrity presenter and a black human being (112), narrates part of the story of the making of a documentary film about the idea of Arcadia; at other times he is the Jamesian “reflector�…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1975 words

Citation: Ringrose, Christopher. "In Arcadia". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 January 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=23026, accessed 26 November 2024.]

Save this article