Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Challenge from Yoruba Studies in the West

Great questions you posed:

1. There are no well-established academic movements advancing a collective agenda.
2. There is no alliance between cultural and political movements.
3. We don't have the equivalent of the Brazillian Model, as in Ile Aiye and similar ones.

 

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Date: Wednesday, December 25, 2024 at 6:29 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <Yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Challenge from Yoruba Studies in the West

Is there such a thing as a centre or centres of Yoruba Studies, the exploration of an ethnic group centred in Nigeria but also present in other parts of Africa and deeply influential in the African diaspora in the Americas?

 

If you want to study Yoruba civilization, its history, current state and possibilities, where is the best place to go?

 

Is it the universities in Nigeria's South West, where the Yoruba are concentrated, universities some of which, such as the University of Ibadan and Obafemi Awolowo University,  were fundamental to the creation of what is now known globally as African Studies, a shaping influence that continue to reverberate?

 

Studying at such universities ensures one is more readily enabled to immerse oneself in Yoruba life, although other locations in Africa and the efflorescence of Yoruba spiritual culture in the Americas also provide great opportunities for such study.

 

Given the centrality of Yorubaland to the culture and civilization being studied, why are the most powerful books I am seeing in this field in the last 11 years produced by Yoruba and non-Yoruba scholars in the US?

 

Am I inadequately exposed?

 

In my admittedly unsystematic exposure to publications in Yoruba arts,I wonder if the kinds of books I have encountered from scholars in the West are reciprocated by publications by scholars in Yorubaland.

 

Last month, Nov 2024, Toyin Falola at the University of Texas,  published Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks.

 

In 2020, Akinwumi Ogundiran, then at UNC Charlotte,   published The Yoruba:A New History.

 

These are very ambitious books, representing decades, perhaps a lifetime of work.

 

What does it take to nurture such scholars and such scholarship?

 

 

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