USA Africa Dialogue Series - Announcing the Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora

Ibadan Cultural Studies Group, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria

 

Announces

The Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora

 

www.ibadanculturalstudiesgroup.org/toyinfalolaconference

 

In pursuance of its mandate which includes the promotion of excellence in cultural studies, the Ibadan Cultural Studies Group, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in collaboration with many African universities, is pleased to announce The Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora. This conference will provide an international forum where scholars, researchers, graduate students, policy makers, and technocrats from all over the world will converge annually to address issues that relate to Africa and the Diaspora in the strict academic tradition, in order to extend the frontier of knowledge, explore possible collaboration on matters of knowledge and development, culture and global peace.  The conference will provide a global forum designed to engage minds for ideation, intellection and distillation in various aspects of knowledge to advance the cause of Africa and people of African descent.

 

The conference is so named as an enduring legacy in honour of Professor Toyin Falola of the University of Texas at Austin, USA, in recognition of his tremendous achievements as a scholar and teacher of African and African American History. Dr. Toyin Falola is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a creative writer, a foremost academic icon and certainly, and now the most celebrated published African/Black scholar of all times. In late March 2010, the publication of his 100^th book received an acclaim. Two books were presented at the event to mark the great occasion, The Long Arm of Africa: The Prodigious Career of Toyin Falola (180pp), which contains the summary of each of Dr. Falola’s 100+ published books co-edited by Vik Bahl and Falola’s daughter, Bisola, and Toyin Falola: the Man, The Mask, The Muse, a 1015pp bio-critical study edited by Professor Niyi Afolabi.  On Saturday evening of October 31, 2009, Dr. Falola was presented with the prestigious Africana Studies Distinguished Global Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award by Chancellor Charles Bantz of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis at the Awards Dinner for the 1st Public Scholars in Africana Studies International Conference on Globalization held in Indianapolis.   The organizers of the Award had this to say on the selection of Dr. Falola for this significant award: 

 

The presentation of the Africana Studies Distinguished Global Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award represents our best efforts to recognize an individual who can more accurately be described as the "quintessential ‘scholar's scholar,’" i.e., a person whose lifetime has been exemplified by the relentless search for knowledge in all of its various facets and whose total body of scholarship through the years has been considered by his/her peers to be of the highest level of excellence. We wanted to recognize a scholar who has developed a stellar global reputation because of the significant impacts his/her scholarship has had on the global academy and who has used his/her platform unselfishly to elevate others, particularly  students, professional colleagues, and members of the public at large. We also wanted to recognize a scholar whose academic research has had transformative effects on the various global epistemological debates which have preoccupied scholars in his/her disciplinary area of focus through the years and whose work has provided an important platform for the development of an ongoing critical discourse with regard to the continuing relevancy of understanding and respecting African people, cultures, and ideologies, both in the past and contemporary time periods ... The academic world has run out of superlatives to describe the magnificent body of scholarship produced through the years by the indefatigable, Dr. Toyin Falola.

 

The above statement summarizes it all- the person and personality as a great mentor, coupled with his unparalleled academic achievements in the humanities foreground our choice of Dr Toyin Falola. An annual conference is the least we can put in place to sustain and ensure the continuity of what Professor Toyin Falola’s stands for— the promotion of excellence in Africa and the Diaspora scholarship.

Professor Ademola Dasylva

Co-coordinator, ICSG