Conference Announcement:
The Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan and the Pan African University Press are convening a one-day conference on the new book by Toyin Falola,
In Praise of Greatness: Poetics of African Adulation
(Carolina Academic Press, 2019).
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Faculty of Arts,
University of Ibadan,
Nigeria
The new Toyin Falola extraordinary book unfurls new narratives tracking the history of many African scholars, promoting their experiences and works to place them in a larger context — drawing correlations with their significance for Africa's past, present, and future. A diversity of voices has been created in the book's chapters, some affirming the common historiography and others providing alternatives to established ideas. Voices representing past canonized African studies are presented, as well as those offering new points of reference for emerging trends. The constellations presented in the book contribute to different kinds of narratives.
In illuminating scholarship and pursuing biographical representation, In Praise of Greatness revitalizes different genres and tropes; it dispels the notion of African studies as a singular universal reality; it endows knowledge with relevance in ideas and practices; it locates the producers of knowledge in their cultural abode and garb; and it establishes a cultural language for speaking about people, relating their mini-biographies to a cultural and scholarly context.
This conference concerns itself with wide-ranging discussions of the various aspects of the book--its methodology and approach, some not previously attempted, the use of original primary texts—a series of mini biographies and poems—to generate an expansive book, the art of genre-bending, genre-smashing and genre-reconstructing, and the end result of combining prose and poetry for a non-fictional work.
Over twenty papers will be presented by a cast of established and emerging scholars who will be expected to do intellectual justice to understanding how this book intersects the many dimensions of African cultural beingness. The expectation for the Conference is to have scholars of different backgrounds interrogate this book from varied and various intellectual perspectives: Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Literary Studies, Linguistics, African Studies, and so on.
The one-day conference will have eight concurrent panels, as well as poetry recitations and other cultural performances.
Keynote
Professor Michael Oladejo Afolayan,
CEO, M&P Educational Consulting International,
Osogbo, Nigeria.
Contact Info:
Dr. Adeshina Afolayan
Department of Philosophy,
University of Ibadan
Contact Email: <adeshinaafolayan@gmail.com>
Department of Philosophy
University of Ibadan
+23480-3928-8429
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