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Research Paper | English Language and Literature | India | Volume 12 Issue 5, May 2023

The Sun That Never Rose: Postcoloniality and Pan Africanism in Adichie

Nilanjana Sinha

Abstract: Written against the backdrop of the 1967 Biafran War, Adichie's 'Half of a Yellow Sun' has produced integrated colonial questions that sought answers in the postcolonial world. How radicalism was substantiated through the process of civilizing missions when in reality the economic greed overweighed moralities, if there were any to have existed. If colonialism started with disintegration, it ended with the same. The stigma of the postcolonial world, having ripped off the cultural roots and indoctrinated with insecurities, was that 'identity assertion' became a need, that this is who we are and not what you have narrated us to be. This is partly why concepts like pan-africanism even arose in the postcolonial context, the necessity to establish a secure unchallenging identity, because the colonial psychological intensity had not abated even after years of decolonization, neither it is fully ever likely to be. The linear narrative of the novel provides sequential build up to the failed Biafran war, and Adichie expounds postcolonial issues like nativism, separatism, semantics and linguistic barriers, cultural syncretism and identity assertion. This paper seeks to analyze the postcoloniality in Adichie's writing of the 'Half of a Yellow Sun.'

Keywords: colonialism, disintegration, identity assertion, radicalism

Edition: Volume 12 Issue 5, May 2023,

Pages: 1566 - 1567