This book is an extensive and captivating study of the work of Femi Osofisan, one of Nigeria’s most important dramatists and postcolonial playwrights. It explores a variety of his plays to gather together insights on the role of art in social change, and discusses the relationship between literature and politics.

This compendium of 37 essays provides global perspectives of Achebe as an artist with a proper sense of history and an imaginative writer with an inviolable sense of cultural mission and political commitment.

Emerging Perspectives on Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo is a collection of 15 critical essays that highlights the literary contributions of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo as one of Nigeria’s leading female writers. The book includes a literary biography, professional profile, and an interview with professor Adimora-Ezeigbo that offers valuable insight into her life and works. Contributing scholars provide critical and theoretical perspectives on Adimora-Ezeigbo’s ouvre that represents a postcolonial lens to interpret the African world. Emerging Perspectives contextualizes Adimora-Ezeigbo’s works of fiction, poetry, and drama within African, Nigerian, and Women’s literary tradition. This collection builds upon critical and theoretical scholarship on leading African writers whose works comprise a dynamic and compelling genre of African writing that spans the post-independence era into the 21st century. The essays examine themes from Adimora-Ezeigbo’s writing such as patriarchy, feminism, war, cultural traditions, and contemporary issues in Nigerian society such as trafficking, and many of the social, economic, and political challenges to Nigeria’s development as a modern nation state.

This anthology presents the most comprehensive and up-to-date critical works on the creative ingenuity of Femi Osofisan, one of the most prolific contemporary African writers ever. With contributions from a distinguished set of literary scholars, Toyin Falola and Tunde Akinyemi's innovative anthology covers a broad range of themes, including literature and society, gender, style and the use of language, the mobility of oral tradition and translation/transliteration.

Onomastics is an area of scholarly interest that has grown considerably in importance in recent years. Consequently, the 27th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, held in 2021 in Kraków, Poland, gathered scholars from all over the world, active in all subfields of onomastic enquiry, as well as those exploring the areas bordering on other disciplines of the humanities. It thus became a venue for presenting state-of-the-art research in the study of proper names, proposing novel approaches and opening new vistas for future research. The present work is the third of the three volumes of conference proceedings that are the fruit of the congress. Being the most diverse thematically, it contains contributions on the general and applied aspects of onomastics, onymy in literature and other cultural texts, and chrematonyms. It ends with two reports. The volume comprises 30 individual articles, contributed by 35 scholars. The first section, devoted to general and applied onomastics, features texts concerned with ever-interesting questions relevant to all practitioners of the discipline: the essence of properhood, the meaning of proper names, and onomastic terminology. Scholars whose papers focused on applied onomastics were interested in problems occasioned by the translation of onyms, by their pronunciation in cross-cultural contact, and by the use of exonyms, drawing for exemplification on the Hungarian, German and Czech language material respectively. Literary onomastics in its broad definition constitutes by far the largest part of the volume. Contributors to this section represent diverse literatures, including Scottish, Russian, Polish, Czech and Nigerian. The scope and internal subdivisions of literary onomastics are discussed and the activities of the Italian Society for Literary Onomastics are presented. The name Dracula is analysed in depth, and so is the Old Prussian onym Patollo. Some researchers take a step into the wider realm of culture. Their attention is attracted by the names of spirits in the beliefs adhered to in Southwest China, by the proper names in a medieval Scottish document, by the onyms that personify hunger in Italian wartime epistolography, and by toponyms in video games. The third section deals with chrematonyms as diverse as names of railway locomotives in Britain, logonyms in Slovakia and perfume names in a Slovak online shop. The naming patterns of Chinese restaurants in Czechia are studied too, as well as the names of travel agencies in Germany, Ukraine and Poland. Finally, the reader is presented with two reports. One outlines new tendencies in Nordic socio-onomastics, while the other presents the new paradigm in the publication of “Onoma”, the journal of the ICOS. The book is a must not only for onomasticians, but also for researchers in related disciplines, ranging from history, via human geography or philosophy of language, to social studies. However, professionals active in naming will find it useful as well, since it provides a much-needed supranational perspective and enables cross-cultural comparisons.

Imagining Vernacular Histories is centered on the idea of engaging with indigenous African cosmologies that signal at pluriversality. In conversation with Toyin Falola’s reading of the African pluriverse and his exploration of the idea of “ritual archives,” the contributors to this volume rethink the historical archive in search of vernacular histories. Simultaneously, they recognize the contributions from various other disciplines in pluralizing the term vernacular. The book brings together a wide range of topics, such as reflections on African historiography; the relationship between memory, history and literature; gender relations; and the construction of historical archives. While appropriating Falola’s conception of vernacular histories, the contributors collectively argue that pluriversality and ritual archives can potentially rescue African historical and creative scholarship from the sustained practices of epistemicide. Simultaneously, Imagining Vernacular Histories focuses on the emerging interdisciplinary conversations on constructing the pluriverse as well as on the geopolitics of knowledge production. Through a critical appreciation of Falola’s engagement with the ideas of postcoloniality, decolonizing epistemologies, and pluriversality, this book locates his scholarship in relation to postcolonial theory emerging from the Global South.

This book explains the connections between traditional performance (e.g. masked dances, prophecy, praise recitations), contemporary theatre (Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Tess Onwueme, Femi Osofisan, and Stella Oyedepo) , and the political sphere in the context of the Yorùbá people in Nigeria.

This handbook offers the most comprehensive, analytic, and multidisciplinary study of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the African Diaspora to date. Preeminent scholars Akintunde Akinyemi and Toyin Falola assemble a team of leading and rising stars across African Studies research to retrieve and renew the scholarship of oral traditions and folklore in Africa and the Diaspora just as critical concerns about their survival are pushed to the forefront of the field. With five sections on the central themes within orality and folklore – including engagement ranging from popular culture to technology, methods to pedagogy – this handbook is an indispensable resource to scholars, students, and practitioners of oral traditions and folklore preservation alike. This definitive reference is the first to provide detailed, systematic discussion, and up-to-date analysis of African oral traditions and folklore.