Marketing a Scholarly Book
Unifying Possibilities in African Cultural Studies through a Grounding in Yoruba Thought and Art
Who is Likely to Read Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art
Second Edition?
New Cover Showing a Babalawo, a Diviner of the Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge, on Horseback, suggesting babalawos' ceaseless quest for knowledge, travelling across physical distances to learn from other adepts and voyaging across varied dimensions of existence through ''steeds of discourse'', a Yoruba term for vehicles of metaphorical thought and expression, imaginative dynamisms vital for exploring crevices of knowledge, the highways and byways of knowing, unravelling knots of possibility and perplexity, metaphoric dynamisms that are the subject of the book, as the babalawo carries on his head a form of the Yoruba Calabash of Totality and Existence, the Igba Iwa, its circularity evoked by the sphericality of the bowl the babalawo carries, an agere ifa, a bowl containing the palm nuts the symbolic configurations of which enable the mapping of the intersections of dimensions in generating human possibilities, as Rowland Abiodun's description of the symbolism of the horse rider may be adapted.
Cover Design and Execution by Wole Oyeniyi
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Rowland Abiodun's Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, second edition.
A magnificent book.
Who is likely to read it?
Who is likely to use it as part of academic training for students?
What are the chances of its being taught in Nigerian universities beyond Nigeria's Southwest Yoruba region?
Are there any hopes of its being used in Northern Nigeria, whose culture is centred in Islam, and whose endogenous Hausa and Fulani cultures may have suffered under Islam the kind of subjugation in the world of learning Abiodun's book is directed at liberating Yoruba and other indigenous African cultures from?
What about the need for greater global appreciation of the philosophical insights and artistic achievements of Islamic civilizations, the kind of plural sensitivities and knowing Abiodun's book advocates in exploring Yoruba art and thought through the English language and in a Western scholarly context?
Yet, is there any book of this level of quality addressing relationships between the verbal and non-verbal arts of any other Nigerian ethnic group?
The recently published Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta impressively discusses the oral, written, visual and performative arts of this region as distinct forms.
Does it also explore the possibility of their unification and expansion of value through Niger Delta theories of discourse, emerging from the multi-expressive unity of Nsibidi, for example?
Moving from the specific to the general, from individual creative expressions to theoretical syntheses further illuminating the possibilities of individual creativities.
How may such unifying scholarship be galvanized into existence?
The flowering of literary, theoretical and visual artistic expression by the Nsukka Art School, fed by the multidisciplinary genius of Uche Okeke and the inspiring force of Uli art, multidisciplinary creativities running from Uche Okeke, to Obiora Udechukwu to Olu Oguibe and more.
To what degree have they been understood and studied as a creative nexus projecting a unity of imaginative possibilities fed by the Nsukka/Igbo matrix, assimilating an international range of influences, from Igbo Uli to Chinese calligraphy to Ewe symbolism and Western expressive dynamisms?
What about other African countries and their constituent cultures?
To what degree are such people likely to appreciate the ultimate pan-African vision of Abiodun's book, transecting Africa through a grounding in Yoruba thought and art, suggesting what can be done in the study of relationships between art and thought in other African cultures?
How sensitive could they be to the book's projecting of densely imaginative configurations unifying the verbal, visual and performative arts as fundamental to African discourse, exemplified by Yoruba thought?
Is there a work of this calibre demonstrating for example, what Kwasi Konadu describes as "proverbs channels" , non- verbal forms metaphorically concretizing the broad and yet succinct semantic range, the meaning scope of proverbs in Akan culture in relation to diverse expressive forms, a multi-expressive convergence he discusses in Indigenous Medicine and Knowledge in an African Society, the kind of multi-expressive unities Abiodun describes for Yoruba creativities and which the lukasa of the Luba of the Congo also indicates, in unifying history, literature, philosophy and spirituality through the associative powers of the hand held lukasa, it's ergonomic handiness as it fits in the hand, emblazoned with abstract forms, concretizing broad zones of knowing taking years to master, as described by Thomas Reefe in ''Lukasa : A Luba Memory Device'' and by Allen and Nootter Roberts in their essay and book, Memory:Luba Art and the Making of History?
Abiodun's book provides a paradigm for the integration of scholarship on the multidisciplinary unities various African cultures have developed, unifying the infinite scope of knowledge, in it's subdivisions, it's distinctive disciplines as developed in those cultures, within the matrix of the unfolding vastness of the quest for knowing.
As the book nears completion, I, the publisher, become increasingly concerned.
The author's major reason for having a second, expanded edition of the book is to increase its global accessibility. He also wants his fellow Nigerians to have ready access to it, since his Nigerian, specifically Yoruba heritage, is the subject of the book, its inspirational matrix, the geographical and cultural space where he developed its ideas, the region where he published papers that are foundational to the work, before complementing these earlier, formative developments through working as an academic in the United States.
Scholars outside Africa, perhaps more sensitive to a synoptic approach to African cultures, might be more sensitive to the book's significance in providing illumination on creative possibilities in the study of Africa's varied cultures but how alive to this value would Africans in Africa be, in being perhaps particularly alert to their own cultures as opposed to the larger African matrix?
Would an Igbo, Edo, Kalabari, Tiv, Hausa, Fulani, Zulu, Akan or Luba scholar, for example be excited about a book on Yoruba art and language, even if it claims to be arguing for a pan-African orientation to discourse?
I want to promote the book as meant to inspire a revolution in general thought as well as in academic reflection and practice, engendering ideas and orientations that become part of the cultural mainstream.
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