Introduction. Nigerian Connections -- Palm Wine, Amos Tutuola, and a Literary Gatekeeper -- Bahia-Lagos-Ouidah: Mariana's Story -- Igbo Life, Past and Present: Three Views -- Inland, Upriver with the Empire: Borrioboola-Gha -- The City, according to Ekwensi . . . and Onuzo -- Points of Cultural Geography: Ibadan . . . Enugu, Onitsha, Nsukka -- Been-To: Dreams, Disappointments, Departures, and Returns -- Dateline Lagos: Reporting on Nigeria to the World -- Death in Lagos -- Tai Solarin: On Colonial Power, Schools, Work Ethic, Religion, and the Press -- Wole Soyinka, Leo Frobenius, and the Ori Olokun -- A Voice from the Purdah: Baba of Karo -- Bauchi: The Academic and the Imam -- Railtown Writers -- Nigeria at War -- America Observed: With Nigerian Eyes -- Transatlantic Shuttle -- Sojourners from Black Britain -- Oyotunji Village, South Carolina: Reverse Afropolitanism.

African literature has never been more visible than it is today. Whereas Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o defined a golden generation of African writers in the 20th century, a new generation of “Afropolitan” writers including Chimamanda Adichie, Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi, and NoViolet Bulawayo have taken the world by storm by snatching up prestigious awards and selling millions of copies of their works. But what is the new, increasingly fashionable and marketable, Afropolitan vision of Africa's place in the world that they offer? How does it differ from that of previous generations? Why do some dissent? Afropolitanism refuses to reinforce images of Africa in world media as merely poor, war-torn, diseased, and constantly falling into chaos. By complicating the image of Africa as a hapless victim, Afropolitanism focuses on the wide-ranging influence Africa has on the world. However, some have characterized this kind of writing as light, populist fare that panders to Western audiences. Afropolitan Literature as World Literature examines the controversy surrounding Afropolitan literature in light of the unprecedented circulation of culture made possible by globalization, and ultimately argues for expanding its geographic and temporal boundaries.

Central to the Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 is an invitation to take incompleteness seriously in how we imagine, relate to and seek to understand a world in perpetual motion. Despite our instinct for and obsession with completeness, we are constantly reminded that the sooner one recognises and provides for incompleteness and the conviviality it inspires as the normal way of being, the better we are for it. Fluidity, compositeness and the capacity to be present in multiple places and forms simultaneously in whole or in fragments are core characteristics of reality and ontology of incompleteness. How would we frame our curiosities and conversations about processes, relationships and phenomena with an understanding of the universality of incompleteness and mobility? West and Central Africa, for example, are regions where it is commonplace to embrace and celebrate incompleteness in nature, the suprasensory, human beings, human actions, human inventions and human achievements. The lectures indicate how we could draw inspiration in this regard to inform current clamours for decolonisation and the growing ambivalence about rapid advances in digital technologies (artificial intelligence (AI) in particular), as well as with twenty-first century concerns about migrants and strangers knocking at the doors of opportunities we feel more entitled to as bona fide citizens and insiders. The lectures draw on the writings of Amos Tutuola as well as from popular ideas of personhood and agency in Africa, to make a case for sidestepped and silenced traditions of knowledge. They highlight Africa’s possibilities, prospects and emergent capacities for being and becoming in tune with the continent’s creativity and imagination. They speak to the nimble-footed flexible-minded frontier African at the crossroads and junctions of myriad encounters, facilitating creative conversations and challenging regressive logics of exclusionary claims and articulation of identities and achievements. The traditions of knowledge discussed in these lectures do not only speak to Africans, but to the world, as the philosophies explored have universal application. “The crucial anthropological question of relationality and othering is at the heart of this original and enlightening book. Nyamnjoh cautions the missionaries of decoloniality against the risk of substituting one illusion of completeness with another. For him, incompleteness is the basis of any healthy exchange. He therefore recommends embracing the universality of incompleteness in motion and taking seriously an ancestral tradition of self-extension through creative imagination in this anxious age of artificial intelligence. Forcefully argued and abundantly substantiated – with finesse and laughter that run through it – this book will be a milestone by making us rediscover the demands and the magic of fieldwork.” Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main Frobenius-Institut, Frankfurt/Main Point Sud, Bamako, Mali

Engagements with Hybridity in Literature: An Introduction is a textbook especially for undergraduate and graduate students of literature. It discusses the different dimensions of the notion of hybridity in theory and practice, introducing the use and relevance of the concept in literary studies. As a structured and up-to-date source for both instructors and learners, it provides a fascinating selection of materials and approaches. The book examines the concept of hybridity, offers a historical overview of the term and its critique, and draws upon the key ideas, trends, and voices in the field. It critically engages with the theoretical, intellectual, and literary discussions of the concept from the time of colonialism to the postmodern era and beyond. The book enables students to develop critical thinking through engaging them in case studies addressing a diverse selection of literary texts from various genres and cultures that open up new perspectives and opportunities for analysis. Each chapter offers a specific theoretical background and close readings of hybridity in literary texts. To improve the students’ analytical skills and knowledge of hybridity, each chapter includes relevant tasks, questions, and additional reference materials.

This book presents a new way of looking at Wole Soyinka's engagement with the classical past. Nigerian author and activist Wole Soyinka was the first Black African author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1986), and his oeuvre has become seminal to postcolonial literature. The frequent references to Greece and Rome that appear across Soyinka's writings, most explicitly in his 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, have often received short shrift in scholarship on the author. At best, these references have been understood as elements of Soyinka's prodigiously inclusive humanism. At worst, Soyinka's critics argue that the invocations of a Graeco-Roman past testify to the neocolonial cultural affinities that make Soyinka a problematic figure in postcolonial literary history. Adam Lecznar challenges these readings, arguing that Soyinka's authorial outlook is informed by a hybrid form of classicism in which he aligns the legacy of Greece and Rome with the African cultural heritage to form a narrative of literary and cultural value that looks beyond the ancient Mediterranean. This book turns a spotlight on how Soyinka's appeals to Greece and Rome inform his reflections on Africa's ancient past, Yoruba belief, and the modern significance of tragedy. Lecznar contends that Soyinka's notion of classicism is not solely dependent on the memory of the Graeco-Roman past. Rather, it draws innovatively on a global cultural heritage to advance revolutionary and futural narratives of history and identity.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of pupils attended boarding schools in various places across the globe. Their experiences were vastly different, yet they all had in common that they were separated from their families and childhood friends for a period of time in order to sleep, eat, learn and move within the limited spatial sites of the boarding school. This book frames these ‘boarding schools’ as a global and transcultural phenomenon that is part of larger political and social developments of European imperialism, the Cold War, and independence movements. Drawing together case studies from colonial South Africa, colonial India, Dutch Indonesia, early twentieth-century Nigeria, Fascist Spain, Ghana, Nazi Germany, nineteenth-century Ireland, North America and the Soviet Union, this edited collection examines the ways in which boarding schools extracted pupils from their original social background in order to train, mold and shape them so that they could fit into the perceived position in broader society. The book makes the broader argument that framing boarding schools as a global phenomenon is imperative for a deepened understanding of the global and transnational networks that linked people as well as ideas and practices of education and childhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Grounded in both theory and ethnography, this volume insists on taking social positionality seriously when accounting for Africa’s current age of polarizing wealth. To this end, the book advocates a multidimensional view of African societies, in which social positions consist of a variety of intersecting social powers - or ‘capitals’ – including wealth, education, social relationships, religion, ethnicity, and others. Accordingly, the notion of social im/mobilities emphasizes the complexities of current changes, taking us beyond the prism of a one-dimensional social ladder, for social moves cannot always be apprehended through the binaries of ‘gains’ and ‘losses’.

Introduction -- Moving through the Practico-Sensory Realm of Space -- Spatial Textures of the Clinical Encounter -- Misunderstandings, and the Spaces They Create -- Emplacement, Emplotment, 'Empotment' -- Patients, Practitioners and Their Pots -- The Patients -- The Practitioners -- The Pots: Orientations -- Pots, 'Pots' and Pots -- What Is in a 'Pot'? Industrially-Produced Chinese Formula Medicines -- What Makes a Pot Efficacious? Social Distance, Exotic Techniques and -- Potencies beyond Them -- 'The Chinese Antimalarial' as 'Pot' and Pot -- Conclusion. Kaleidoscopic Refractions.

Afropolitan combines the words African and cosmopolitan to describe a contemporary generation of Africans. "A new generation of Africans and people of African descent with a very global outlook" CNN Afropolitan State of Mind is a book collection poetry that took 10+ years to reach completion. The book of consist of 27 poems that focus on the issues and challenges that Africans and people of African descent on the mother land and in the diaspora face on a daily basis. Where you sit when you are old shows where you stood when you were young -African Proverb The purpose of Knowledge is Action, not Knowledge -Aristotle

The African World in Dialogue: An Appeal to Action! is a probing and politically timely collection of essays, interviews, speeches, poetry, short stories, and proposals. These rich works illuminate the struggles, dreams, triumphs, impediments, and diversity of the contemporary African world. The African World in Dialogue contains five sections: "Listen: The Ink Speaks"; "Restitutions, Resolutions, Revolutions"; "Africanity, Education, and Technology"; "Life Lines from the Front Lines"; and "Gender, Power, and Infinite Promise." Each section brims with provocative and compelling insights from elder-warriors, wordsmiths, journalists, and academics, many of whom are also activists. The volume's contributors include Tunde Adegbola, Muhammad Ibn Bashir, Jacqueline Bediako, Charlie Braxton, Alieu Bundu, Baba A. O. Buntu, Chinweizu, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Oyinlola Longe, Jumbe Kweku Lumumba, Morgan Miller, Asiri Odu, Chinwe Ezinna Oriji, Kevin Powell, Blair Marcus Proctor, Ishola Akindele Salami, Aseret Sin, Teresa N. Washington, and Ayoka Wiles. The book also features interviews with Hilary La Force, Mandingo, Kambale Musavili, and Prince Kuma N’dumbe. With selections designed to critique and in many cases upend conventional political thought, educational norms, fantasies of social progress, and gender myths, The African World in Dialogue challenges its audience. The book’s “Appeal to Action” is literal: Rather than offering eloquent elaborations of African world woes, The African World in Dialogue offers detailed plans and paths for emancipation and elevation that readers are urged to implement. Activists and scholars of African studies, African American studies, Pan-Africanism, criminal justice, Black revolutionary thought and action, gender studies, sociology, and political science will find this book to be both inspirational and indispensable.