Cara DeCoste
Robert Arnold
Proposal for Portfolio
4/20/12
Africa is a
place of identity crisis. This has been well established in the many cultural
artifacts we have engaged with over the course of the semester. But why is
this? It is quite common for adolescents to experience some sort of confusion
of identity and search for meaning, but hardly to the extent which these
African children experience. This is because Africa has become a cultural
crossroad, where metanarratives intersect in surprising ways.
A
metanarrative is, quite literally, a ‘big story,’ which relatively large
numbers of people subscribe to as a means of explaining reality. Every religion
has a metanarrative, but cultures also have metanarratives which set the
standards of value for the people in the culture: what is a successful life?
What is good government? How should people interact? Western culture and
African traditional culture have very different, often competing,
metanarratives, and that is the root of many of the identity struggles of the
characters we have studied.
The roots of
this clash of cultures are found in the colonial period, of course, wherein the
Western metanarrative became the master cultural worldview (worldview being
simply ‘a way of looking at the world’ or of explaining the world to oneself –
analogous to a metanarrative, without as strong an implication of explanation
ensconced in story). In modern times, the dichotomy has, if anything, become
‘worse’ due to cultural and economic globalization. Most importantly, its
expression is found in the postcolonial/modern era, and specifically in The
Dark Child and Keita.
In Keita, the
cultural worldviews clash. There are sides, there is conflict, and for a while
it is ugly. But it hints at a possible, enriching compromise. The meeting of
the metanarratives is gentled by the
general support of the protagonist’s family in The Dark Child, yet the end
points to an either-or decision between the worldviews and therefore his path
in life. The purpose of my proposed paper will be to briefly examine the
origins of the mixing metanarratives, to articulate the cultural values of each
as they appear in Keita and the Dark Child, and to examine those two cultural
artifacts’ statements about each worldview and how they possibly interact.
