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
a repressed history of the Nigerian Civil War that resulted in 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 neocolonialist 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 the 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 a
novel alternative to the elitist intellectual, characterizing Ugwu as an author whose book
universalizes the Biafran crisis and humanizes its victims.