I bought the Calvino book as a battered second hand copy at the Oba Market in Benin, possibly having had to step through muddy paths after rain, bypassing the tomato, pepper and other food sellers to reach the book stalls where I bought some of my very best books ever, including a pristine copy of Ulli Beier's book on Yoruba cosmology through the art and thought of Susanne Wenger, The Return of the Gods: The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, one of the best books on Yoruba thought, a book part of which I copied out by hand when I first encountered it at the then Bendel Library in Benin when it had no photocopiers and which I saw again eventually locked behind glass as a special book at Oxfam's bookshop in Cambridge.
On sighting the book on that day in Oba Market, I composed myself stealthily and asked its price in a nonchalant manner, so that my burning desire would not lead to a price hike. Having eventually paid for it a price that I understood as practically nothing in relation to the value of the book, I took it home, leaving the bookseller happy with what he understood as a good sale, careful to avoid any untoward interaction on the way that would negatively affect the new child I had acquired.
Calvino's Invisible Cities is a fantastic re-imagining of Marco Polo's accounts of his travels in marvellous places around the world. Calvino uses the motif of the city as a means of reflecting on human communities in cities, the possibilities they generate, the interactions and imaginings they enable. Stories told in small, poetic chapters.
I did not publish the essay earlier beceause I had little clue about the kind of scholar I wanted to be besides being simply happy to research and write.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju,
It must have been a tremendous task putting it all together.
Mighty Congratulations to the Editors Samuel Ojo Oloruntoba, Toyin Falola and all the contributors to
The Palgrave Handbook of Africa and the Changing Global Order, a necessary reference book for the Africaphile people...
Mighty congratulations to you too , personally, for Spatial Navigation as a Hermeneutic Paradigm Ifa, Heidegger and Calvino as your contribution.
You must have also had some fun writing it to illuminates Ifa, but lo and behold, you have been keeping this under your hat all this time. Kudos. I'm impressed. Some other kind of fellow would have let the cat out of the bag a along time ago and been boasting about it full-time. I daresay the title of your contribution sounds sufficiently complicated / sophisticated / forbidding to scare something out of a humble soul like yours truly and I suppose other non-specialists who may be interested in African Spirituality/African spiritual realms too , but at the same time, to whet our interest to learn something new, because most humble folks have scarcely heard of Heidegger or Calvino and as for me , I remain a total ignoramus about all three ( Ifa, Heidegger , and Calvino). However, the 54 contributions have a general, broad appeal - a little something for everyone. I notice that the contributions about music and the export of culture, etc., all come under the "Africa and Global Religions and Creativity" section of the book. Kudos everybody! During this on-going changing of the Global order - with all the politics and economic that undergirds these changes, this handbook latest is surely a landmark in the American Publishing world for the year 2022.
The book is quite expensive. No nice price, special concessions for the poverty stricken? I know that we should be forced to pay through the nose for real quality, eh ?
Even as an independent scholar, don't you think that it's time for your appointment as Adjunct Professor or researcher -in-residence - more money for your electricity generator, more money from the royalties
More music:
Nyboma : Zatcha ( 1982)
Nyboma: Malcolm X ( 1995)
--On Monday, 3 January 2022 at 22:41:37 UTC+1 ovdepoju wrote:EditedMy 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 classical landscape designers still awaiting the scope of 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 pregnant 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, determined 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 Calvino'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 convergences and divergences represented by various stations, where unanticipated encounters may emerge?
Heidegger's metaphorization of philosophical exploration in terms of paths of enquiry in ceaselessly unfolding spaces?
Eshu as fundamental hermeneute, eyes overlooking the circle of exploration of possibilities at the intersection of matter and spirit, of past, present and future that is the opon ifa, the Ifa divination tray, his crossroads location evocative of the intersection of what is, what was and what may be, guide to the flight of the mind across these constellations of possibility?
Shapes of experience and imagination rising from motion within physical spaces and their possibilities for interpersonal encounter, Calvino's take on city space?
Geography as personal and communal cosmos?
thanks
toyin
On Mon, 3 Jan 2022 at 19:53, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@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 <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:--
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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