Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Palgrave Handbook of Africa and the Changing Global Order

Great thanks, Ken and Michael.

Thanks for that superb  Eshu characterisation, Michael.  Striking and memorable, suggesting Eshu as one of the richest fruits of the  complexity and subtlety of the Yoruba imagination,  correlative with the harmony of contraries in Igbo thought highlighted by Achebe and scholarship on his work and embodied perhaps by the deity Agwu.

I was mesmerised by the technological marvel that is the London Underground, coming as I did from an environment where trains hardly existed, and electricity unreliable, and having first begun my educational career in this new environment in a small city, Kent, where there were no trains. 

The marshalling of sophisticated technological  structures  in relation to skilled human power at different levels, the logistical symmetry enabling the working of  such a  massive transportation system,  was spellbinding, thrilling me whenever I think of it, leading to reflection on the meaning, the mental, social and scientific parameters that enable a technological society, a culture of resource management that is a far cry from simply being able to consume the products of such societies, such as riding sophisticated cars over roads of various levels of quality, across environments where the struggle for such basics as water co-exists with Internet access.

This transportation system is  abstracted in terms of one of the iconic forms of the city's culture, the map of the London Underground, beautifully produced in many formats and colours, a visual delight and organisational wonder produced for carrying in one's pocket as one uses the network, evoking various kinds of spatial mapping in relation to motion,  Australian Aboriginal songlines integrating stories, fused with music,  of the journeys of mythic ancestors across landscape  as they created the world, to the contemporary Western Pagan understanding of  currents of energy underlying the earth,  to roads linking the  shrines marking various places in Benin, tree and human made shrines rich in history,  sites of intercourse between humans and spirits, dense with the atmospheric concentration of numinous spaces, the official shrine network amplified by my own exposure to various other trees I understood as sharing the numinous potency of such locations as the grove shrine at Ikpoba hill where the Oba of Benin communes with his ancestors, this tree shrine network  becoming for me  a cosmos of value, enchanted locations I would visit physically and in imagination, with at times startling outcomes, from sensing arcane presences, powerful but strange  intelligences, to entry into another dimension where one interacted with a mysterious  personage; a massive iroko tree of unimaginaginable ancientness  which I sensed as harbouring intense but invisible activity of unseen agents in aerial motion between the tree and locations beyond, another which I was convinced was conscious of itself, a self knowing but inanimate entity, an intelligence I could reach mentally if I tried, my effort at telepathic communication with one such iroko leading to the formation of an  idea I was convinced came from the tree, an abominable conception alien to my thinking yet consonant with legends about iroko, spiritually luminous in African folklore, the entire network centred for me in the Ogba forest, its atmosphere a classic demonstration of  ''an invisble but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the non-rational element of vital religion,'' as Webster's dictionary defines Rudolph Otto's idea, the numinous.

Spatial abstractions, physically visual or purely mental, maps of the existent, the probable and the improbable, links between what is, what was, what may be and what cannot be, conjuncting physical, mental, social and spiritual universes, geography and cosmology, space, time and infinity,  the map of the London Underground a visualisation of a physical network enabling both anticipated and unanticipated outcomes through the dynamism of human motion, the spatial womb of the opon ifa, the Ifa divination tray, the space where symbolic configurations of possibility emerge through the spatial patterns they assume as they are cast on that surface, evoking the space of possibility that is the "odu"of Olodumare, the egg from which the universe breaks open into being, as Ulli Beier puts it, the calabash of possibility from which each moment is born, the fathomless ground of all possibilities, correlating Rosenberg on Olodumare with Wariboko on Boehme's idea of the Ugrund, the fathomless abyss birthing all that is and may be.

Perhaps one's life may be imagined as a map of possibility, of environments where particular possibilities were realized and others unfulfilled, a constellation of possibility moving into a future predictable within the framework of the known but unpredictable in relation to the unknown, emerging from the mystery of individual beginning and transition into the unknown, conjunctive with the mystery of the "why" and "how" of  cosmic genesis and of it's ultimate progression, possibilities visualised in terms of stations akin to the Underground, their ultimate origination imagined in terms of the empty centre of the opon ifa, as Eshu's face looks on in the eyes on it's rim, evoking  quest for understanding within that which is  unanticipatable in it's entirety, the ikin and opele patterns breaking open from this empty centre as these instruments  are cast in divination representing the configurations of awareness and action constituting the journey of the self, subsumed within the circle of eternity, as Sanchez interprets the circular structure of opon ifa.

O masters, grant entry into such wisdom, thoughts and images fused within the mind, merging with  the All Knowing, dropped into the human mind as a drop from the fathomless ocean.

thanks

toyin

On Tue, 4 Jan 2022 at 08:59, 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Oluwatoyin:

Great background to the write-up. I have not read your chapter but you sure have tantalized my appetite and can't wait to read it. I appreciate your relentlessness (or is it restlessness or even both) in your pursuit of intellection. If there is an Oriṣa you remind one of, it is Eṣu (not Satan o, but the primordial spirit of the junction whose hermeneutic power birthed the universe of knowledge among the Yoruba), the agent provocateur of chaos and peace, an enemy like a friend and a friend with the appearance of an enemy. The "everlasting aide de camp to Olodumare" is among his panegyrics. Sometimes you don't want him, but often you can't do without him. Quite peculiar among the Oriṣas but very interesting. 

Keep it up and have a Happy and productive 2022!

MOA

On Tuesday, January 4, 2022, 04:41:30 AM GMT+7, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

My chapter in this book is titled  "Spatial Navigation as a Hermeneutic Paradigm: Ifa, Heidegger and Calvino".

 

Great thanks to Samuel Oloruntoba, one of the editors, for his role in alerting me to the possibility of publishing in this book.

 

The essay was actually written in 2004, at a time of my first experience with the near absolute freedom of postgraduate study in England after the more constricted character of studying in my university in Nigeria.

 

Unifying all my interests, I was at last able to integrate philosophy, literature, spirituality and the visual arts, bringing my explorations in Nigeria into dialogue with my discoveries in England, within a learning culture that prized multidisciplinary self education across disciplines.

 

The essay is actually inspired by a subject perhaps not mentioned within it, perhaps bcs that influence is subliminal rather than immediate- my experiences exploring Benin-City and it's surrounding landscapes and villages, on foot, motivated by the culture of sacred trees that marks the landscape, trees of great epistemic and  metaphysical significance, a subject awaiting adequate exploration.

 

This experience sensitised me to the hermeneutics of landscape, it's interpretive potential, it's embedding of physical, philosophical, spiritual, historical and other values, an interpretive zone in relation to the Benin landscape and the work of it's landscape designers still awaiting the study it deserves, to the best of my knowledge, but foreshadowed by the Benin expression, "aghase se Edo, Edo ree", "When you arrive in Edo, Edo is distant," indicating the discrepancy between physical presence in a location and adequate understanding of the levels of meaning represented by  that location, a cognitive distance even more striking in relation to the cultural density of Benin.

At the time I wrote the essay in question, even that striking piece of knowledge about Benin spatial and cultural theory still lay in my future, being encountered by chance in a news publication, and on which I wrote a short essay, self published online, and a longer one, yet unpublished, from what I recall, along with other work awaiting publication,  inspired by the evocative powers of the Benin landscape.

 

The essay published in the handbook develops in terms of the topography and dynamism of the London Underground, the sensitivities to the intersection of physical and social space first cultivated in me by the Benin landscape.

 

At the time, I was doing two concurrent MA degrees in comparative literature at the University of Kent and another at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, funded by my family in Nigeria, eager to do anything legitimate  to help their creatively restless brother find himself, using my experience in  both programs in feeding each other, adapting the theoretical scope of the SOAS program, Tania Tribe's class on art theory I audited and the research program of humanities public lectures run by  SOAS and nearby UCL in enriching the multi-disciplinary flexibility of the Kent program, the latter integrating broad studies in literature, along with being  open to other disciplines, with the MA in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience, the religion study  program a magnificent stimulant  to my yearning to synthesise  various spiritualities and philosophies.

 

What could the Yoruba origin  Ifa system of knowledge possibly have to do with the London Underground, Eshu, the Yoruba deity, with Martin Heidegger and all these with the Italian writer Italo Calvin's Invisible Cities, which creates a relationship between physical and imagined metropolises?

 

Spatial intersections within Yoruba and other African cosmologies as points of unification of possibilities, physical and spiritual?

 

The Underground as a network of intersections represented by various stations, where unanticipated encounters may emerge?

Heidegger's  metaphorisation of philosophical  exploration in terms of paths of enquiry in ceaselessly   unfolding spaces? 

Shapes of experience and imagination rising from motion within physical spaces and their possibilities for interpersonal  encounter, Calvino's take on city space?

Goegraphy as personal and communal cosmos?

thanks

toyin

 

On Mon, Jan 3, 2022, 15:51 Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-77481-3?token=HOLIDAY21&utm_campaign=3_fjp8312_springerlink_shopping_katte_HOLIDAY21&gclid=Cj0KCQiA2sqOBhCGARIsAPuPK0gmJShKqPeXNKv2bxZrZ7bhXegfGzmiJO13JOGCkDujJ-LEgXguk6saAlehEALw_wcB#toc

 

 

 

 

 

This handbook fills a large gap in the current knowledge about the critical role of Africa in the changing global order. By connecting the past, present, and future in a continuum that shows the paradox of existence for over one billion people, the Handbook underlines the centrality of the African continent to global knowledge production, the global economy, global security, and global creativity. Bringing together perspectives from top Africa scholars, it actively dispels myths of the continent as just a passive recipient of external influences, presenting instead an image of an active global agent that astutely projects soft power. Unlike previous handbooks, this book offers an eclectic mix of historical, contemporary, and interdisciplinary approaches that allow for a more holistic view of the many aspects of Africa's relations with the world.

 

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