Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics covers the major issues in Yorùbá history and politics, offering through narratives of the past and present a solid understanding of one of the most popular ethnic groups in Africa. Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics covers the major issues on Yorùbá history and politics, thus offering a solid understanding of one of the most popular ethnic groups in Africa. With a careful blend of sources and methods, narratives on the past and present, the book manages to present a long history as the backdrop to complicated contemporary politics. Contributors: Tunde M. Akinwumi, Olufunke A. Adeboye, R. T. Akinyele, Aribidesi Usman, Tunde Oduwobi, Olufemi Vaughan, Abolade Adeniji, Jean-Luc Martineau, Ann O'Hear, Rasheed Olaniyi, Charles Temitope Adeyanju, Julius O. Adekunle, Funso Afolayan, Olayiwola Abegunrin. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Ann Genova is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

A rich and accessible account of Yoruba history, society and culture from the pre-colonial period to the present.

This is a book on the social and cultural history of Yoruba people, a people in southwest Nigeria. As the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of Yoruba dress in historical perspective, this book is an important contribution to African history in general and the Yoruba cultural history in particular. The book illuminates the impact of Christianity, Islam, and British colonialism on the construction of Yoruba identity, and how dress was entangled in that construction. It also provides insightful discussions of the transformations in dress culture since independence and demonstrates the importance of dress as a site for contesting and articulating postcolonial Yoruba identity and class structure within the Nigerian national space. This book provides many insights into these issues and is thus an invaluable addition to Africana studies, anthropology, and history.

In this book, Suzanne Preston Blier examines the intersection of art, risk and creativity in early African arts from the Yoruba center of Ife and the striking ways that ancient Ife artworks inform society, politics, history and religion. Yoruba art offers a unique lens into one of Africa's most important and least understood early civilizations, one whose historic arts have long been of interest to local residents and Westerners alike because of their tour-de-force visual power and technical complexity. Among the complementary subjects explored are questions of art making, art viewing and aesthetics in the famed ancient Nigerian city-state, as well as the attendant risks and danger assumed by artists, patrons and viewers alike in certain forms of subject matter and modes of portrayal, including unique genres of body marking, portraiture, animal symbolism and regalia. This volume celebrates art, history and the shared passion and skill with which the remarkable artists of early Ife sought to define their past for generations of viewers.

Yoruba artists have long employed the visual arts to criticize dictatorial and ineffectual governments. This book examines satires of power in Yoruba visual culture from the precolonial to the postcolonial periods of Nigerian history. Prior to the imposition of British colonial rule between 1893 and 1960, there were manifestations of parodies of power in the Yoruba satirical masking as well as in the carvings of some of the leading artists of the era, including the renowned Olowe of Ise, who worked predominantly for many kings in southwestern Nigeria. By the 1940s, Yoruba artists began to use the Western modernist media of editorial cartooning and photography as tools of social and political commentary. This text explores the visual commentaries on colonialism by Akinola Lasekan and the critiques of postcolonial military and civilian leaderships conceived by prominent cartoonists such as Kenny Adamson, Josy Ajiboye, dele jegede, Bisi Ogunbadejo, Boye Gbenro, and Tayo Fatunla. And in the global arena, the book further explores the triad of identity, power, and parody in the postmodern photographs and installations of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Yinka Shonibare, two London-based artists of Yoruba descent. While this book complements previous studies of satire among the Yoruba as an aspect of ritualized performance traditions, it departs from such studies by exploring its appropriations in secular spaces of contemporary visual culture. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "In original, compelling arguments, Ola considers both direct and oblique influences that the Yoruba trickster deity Esu has had on specific works by each artist. Summing up: Recommended." -- CHOICE Magazine

In this book, Oyěwùmí extends her path-breaking thesis that in Yorùbá society, construction of gender is a colonial development since the culture exhibited no gender divisions in its original form. Taking seriously indigenous modes and categories of knowledge, she applies her finding of a non-gendered ontology to the social institutions of Ifá, motherhood, marriage, family and naming practices. Oyěwùmí insists that contemporary assertions of male dominance must be understood, in part, as the work of local intellectuals who took marching orders from Euro/American mentors and colleagues. In exposing the depth of the coloniality of power, Oyěwùmí challenges us to look at the worlds we inhabit, anew.

This book investigates the dynamics and challenges of ethnicity and elite politics in Nigeria.

With the introduction of globalization and domestic change pulsing through Nigeria, its citizens find themselves in a social, political, and economic transition period. After decades of military rule and political instability, Nigeria has reintroduced itself as a democratic state in 1999. This change has brought about questions of how to get Nigeria moving toward economic growth and social unity in the face of globalization, the polarization of Christians and Muslims in Africa, and crises such as HIV/AIDS. The Yoruba, one of Nigeria's most well-known and historically prevalent ethnic groups in Nigeria, has taken an active role in dealing with these issues. Whether motivated by a nationalist vision of a unified, successful Nigeria, or for their own interests in reclaiming political space and retaining Yoruba culture, the Yoruba have greatly contributed to discussions on this transitional era. Contributors to this work display a wide range of disciplines and viewpoints making this work accessible to readers familiar and unfamiliar to the Yoruba. The Yoruba in Transition captures views on the era, highlighting recommendations for this new Nigeria and emphasizing contemporary issues that the Yoruba face. The contributors, many of them Yoruba, illuminate the complexity of identity and how the Yoruba seek to communicate their values, project an image, and live their lives. Included are essays dealing with contemporary issues such as migration, health, agricultural production, cyber crime, and the role of women in Yoruba society. The Yoruba in Transition represents a rare recording of how people within and outside Nigeria view the new millennium for the Yoruba. "[T]he essays are well-written, analytical, and insightful. As a comprehensive and critical volume, Falola and Genova have succeeded in editing an important reader in Yoruba studies. This significant volume will be invaluable to scholars, public policy analysts, and lay readers of Yoruba and Nigerian studies." -- The Journal of the Royal African Society

Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of Òyótúnjí African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yorùbá Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, Òyótúnjí is a Yorùbá revivalist community founded in 1970. Mapping Yorùbá Networks is an innovative ethnography of Òyótúnjí and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yorùbá òrìsà voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. Drawing on several years of multisited fieldwork in the United States and Nigeria, Kamari Maxine Clarke describes Òyótúnjí in vivid detail—the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices—and explores how ideas of what constitutes the Yorùbá past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary Yorùbá transatlantic religious networks and the post-1970s institutionalization of roots heritage in American social life. Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of Òyótúnjí Village’s religious and tourist economy. She discusses how the community generates income through the sale of prophetic divinatory consultations, African market souvenirs—such as cloth, books, candles, and carvings—and fees for community-based tours and dining services. Clarke accompanied Òyótúnjí villagers to Nigeria, and she describes how these heritage travelers often returned home feeling that despite the separation of their ancestors from Africa as a result of transatlantic slavery, they—more than the Nigerian Yorùbá—are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great Òyó Empire of the Yorùbá people. Mapping Yorùbá Networks is a unique look at the political economy of homeland identification and the transnational construction and legitimization of ideas such as authenticity, ancestry, blackness, and tradition.

Ã’sun is a brilliant deity whose imagery and worldwide devotion demand broad and deep scholarly reflection. Contributors to the ground-breaking Africa's Ogun, edited by Sandra Barnes (Indiana University Press, 1997), explored the complex nature of Ogun, the orisa who transforms life through iron and technology. Ã’sun across the Waters continues this exploration of Yoruba religion by documenting Ã’sun religion. Ã’sun presents a dynamic example of the resilience and renewed importance of traditional Yoruba images in negotiating spiritual experience, social identity, and political power in contemporary Africa and the African diaspora. The 17 contributors to Ã’sun across the Waters delineate the special dimensions of Ã’sun religion as it appears through multiple disciplines in multiple cultural contexts. Tracing the extent of Ã’sun traditions takes us across the waters and back again. Ã’sun traditions continue to grow and change as they flow and return from their sources in Africa and the Americas.