Olaniyan Presidential speech 2014

8/9/2019 Olaniyan Presidential speech 2014

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AFRICAN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION New Series: Volume 1, Issue 1, JUNE 2014

NKYIN KYIN CHANGING ONESELF: PLAYING MANY ROLES SINCE 1975

Presidential Speech 201440th Annual ALA Conference

University of the Witwatersrand

Johannesburg, South Africa

Tejumola Olaniyan, ALA President, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin

I want to begin by thanking Professor Bhekizizwe Peterson and allmembers of the Planning Committee and Event Planners for theoutstanding job they have done in hosting this spectacularly successfulconference. If any of you are here, please stand up to be recognized.Please help me give them a warm round of applause. Thank you. Iwould also like to thank the University of Witwatersrand, and morespecifically the School of Language, Literature, and Media, for theirgenerosity and the obviously muscular backing they gave ourcolleague, Bheki Peterson. Vice Chancellor Adam Habibs openingwords on Wednesday about the place of Africa in

the world, the place of an African university in the world marketplace of theproduction of knowledge, and the particularly opportune location of writersand literary scholars in the task of imagining freedom for all here andelsewhere---those words started our conference on an inspiring, elevatednote, and sustained our intellectual exchanges. My profound gratitude toProfessor Habib, and to Professor Ruksana Osman, Dean of Faculty ofHumanities, for their very warm welcome. I extend ALA gratitude too to allthe sponsoring Partners, the keynote and specially invited speakers, and all

participants from near and far, many who came with family members. Thankyou all for your demonstrated commitment to facilitating the sharing anddissemination of expert knowledge on African literature and cultural studies.Thank you for your contributions in diverse ways to making this conferencethe great success that it is. Given its history, ALA was late in coming to ademocratic South Africa, but, better late than never, and I hope it wont takeanother twenty years for the ALA to return to the southern Africa region.

1

My tenure as

president is for me an

opportunity to work in

consolidating ALAs

position as one of the

most important

institutions invested in

all scholarly matters

pertaining to African

literature, African arts,

and cultural

production.

NEWSLETTER

Contents

Convenors Address..7

Departures 2004-2014.10

A Tribute...12

ALA Award Winners...15

Call for Award Nominations17

ALA HQ Directors Report.19

Recent Books21

Let My People Go.23

2014-15 Executive Council..24


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Organizations dont just run themselves;they are run by people. And in a non-profitorganization like the ALA, I am talking of peoplewho are dedicated volunteers committing somuch time, energy, and careful attention to somuch unpaid work. I would like to thank mycolleagues on the Executive Council, the

outgoing president, Soraya Mekerta, and theimmediate past president, Anthonia Kalu, first,for working hard to ensure productivecollaboration with the conference planningcommittee, and second, for their service to ourorganization. I arrive at this position havingbenefitted from the collective wisdom of thosewho preceded me as presidents of the ALA. Tothe newly elected Vice President, Moradewun

Adejunmobi; and newly elected ExecutiveCouncilorsMaryEllen Higgins, PatriceNganang, Keiko Kusunose, and Samuel ZadiIsay, congratulations on yourelect ion, and thank you forvolunteering to serve; ALA is waitingfor your good work! That work willbe ably supported by, among others,our accomplished ALA Headquartersadministrators at Hobart and WilliamSmith Colleges in the US, JamesMcCorkle, Director, and DorothyVogt, Secretary. I gratefu l lyacknowledge their work, as well asthe truly generous support of Hobartand William Smith Colleges. I must

not forget our tireless auditors overthe years, Judy and Adlai Murdoch,doing so much work on such animportant matter, for just merethanks. The ALA is really very appreciative ofher work. Finally, congratulations once again to

ALA award winners. By your accomplishmentsyou have done ALA proud; winning the good

judgment of peers is not an easy thing, whichis why it is priceless. Thank you for yourexample. The sweet coda to all theseorganizational matters is, first, to present theoutgoing President with ALA token of gratitude,

a beautiful plaque.Now, left to me, if I have the power, I

would have ended this speech right at thispoint and say, hurrah, lets go and dance. But,alas, it is the venerable tradition of ALAPresidential Address that the new President not

just meet, greet and thank, but also o#ersome remarks on the condition of our disciplinetoday. Well, I know there are not many people

in this hall who would ever accuse me oflacking an opinion on anything; well, may be ofhaving too much and often polemical opinion.So, let me confess that I am happy to obligeour hallowed tradition by o#ering someremarks about our field of African literarystudies today. I have titled the remarks with a

question. I did so partly because I do not knowmuch of the answers, and partly because, asprofessional critics and scholars, it is how youanswer the question for yourself that reallymatters for your practice. Of course, I will giveyou my own ideas. So, here is the title:

African Literature is Doing Well, Thank You.

But is African Literary Studies?

Let us begin with brief look at the stateof African literature today. As we survey this

literary landscape, we cannot butp roc la im wi th some robustsatisfaction that African literatureand African cultural production are,by and large, in good health. Likelovers of literature elsewhere in theworld, we have good reason toapplaud the classics of a growingcanon of significant works. Just lookat all the popularthough typicallys u b j e c t i v e y a r d s t i c k s o fmeasurement, such as Africas Best100 Books of the Twentieth Century

and many such lists; or the manyliterary awards emanating fromoutside Africa, or the many newliterary awards and literary festivals

that are now proliferating within the continent.Then travel around the continent and see themany locally published writings whose titlesyou wont find anywhere in library databases oron the internet, yet. Just look at all these andwe cannot but be really proud of where Africanliterature stands today.$ We are struck not only by the quantityof African literary and cultural production, but

also by the range of themes, styles, genres,and media of production. In southern Africa totake only one example, we are confronted withan embarrassment of riches, to borrow theoriginally French expression in English. Wehave works written in a variety of languagesincluding IsiZulu, Setswana, English, Afrikaans,and Sesotho among others. We have first timeauthors and established authors competing for

2

Organizations dont

just run themselves;

they are run by people.

And in a non-profit

organization like the

ALA, I am talking of

people who are

dedicated volunteers

committing so much

time, energy, and

careful attention to so

much unpaid work.

Presidential Speech cont.


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prizes. Fiction in both conventional and new,previously unimaginable formats such as themobile or cell phone novel, poetry, literarymemoirs, autobiography and a wide range ofverbal performance. The preoccupation withmacro-politics which predominated during theapartheid eraand which was standard in

African literature generally till the 1980shasyielded much way to a much wider range ofadditional themes and or totally new takes onold themes: social alienation, crime, challengesof rural living, imponderable governmentbureaucracy, pleasures and perils of childhood,sexuality and sexual orientation, the humanand environment intersection, genderedaccess, opportunities, and discriminations,a%rmation of the individual self against theremorseless dictates of culture and tradition,and many others. Here and elsewhere on thec o n t i n e n t , t h e c r o s s -fertilization between andamong radio, television, film,and literature has becomeever more generative, withliterary works crossing fromone medium to another atsome rapid speed. Just thinkof the Arab Spring, forinstance, and the extensivecross-art productivity it hasengendered. A di#erent kindof cross-fertilization is also

taking place between theliterary and other arts as wellas between popular artisticculture and an art culture thatderives its value from criticalaesthetic assessments ratherthan the old anthropologicalfixation with antiqueness andindigenous cultural pedigree.$ This, in spite of all theenormous challenges of dailyl i v ing , i s the th r iv ing ,astoundingly creative artistic-

imaginative landscape ofA f r i c a t o d a y . A f r i c a nliterature, I repeat, is doingwell.

So, what of our field of African literaryscholarship today? By contrast, and veryregretfully, I would have to say that Africanliterary criticism, that is,literary criticism carriedout by scholars who identify themselves as

specialists in African literary studies, is in ananemic state at the moment. Without question,there are the typical few oases that we canidentify. And more generally, we are trying veryhard and have made important marks. On thewhole, though, we are very much laggingbehind our literature. In many publications

specifically dedicated to examining Africanliterature, our current preoccupations as criticshave not extended far beyond those thatanimated discussions from the 1960s to the1980s. For the most part, we remain trappedin the arguments that animated conversationtwo decades or more ago. The critics of thatgeneration responded creatively to thosearguments and challenges to the best of theirability; it does not seem to me that we havepushed the boundaries of their thinking thatmuch further. Take, for example, the old

question of the suspicion of theory. All throughfrom the practical criticism of Eldred DurosimiJones and Dan Izevbaye, to pragmaticsociological-historical bent of Albert Gerard,

Abiola Irele, Bernth Lindfors, Emmanuel

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Thelma Pinto, Sindiwe Magona, Anthonia Kalu



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Obiechina, and Isidore Okpewho, to theMarxist sociology of Molara Ogundipe andOmafume Onoge, to idiosyncratically cite just afew fami l ia r categor ies and lead ingpractitionersall through the beginnings inearly twentieth century to the 1980s, thesuspicion of theory attitude was a very

marginal, peripheral phenomenon. That is, untilthe Bolekaja critics of the 1980sChinweizu,Onwucheka Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuikein their Towards the Decolonisation of AfricanLiteraturewho, riding on the coattails of adissipated American Black Power racialism,popularized the anti-theory attitude bystereotyping a certain kind of modernist workand criticism as theory in general, in oppositionto a supposedly non-theoretical,non-di%cult, and simple Africanness.Oyekan Owomoyela also later

vigorously propagated a similar lineof thinking.$ T h e v a g u e n e s s o rnebulousness of their propositioncaught on, such that that kind ofsuspicious attitude became moregeneralized. But at least, Chinweizuand his colleagues wrote a book thatwe must consider quite self-consciously theoretical, though it was to attacktheory. Although that suspicion of theory haspersisted and is sometimes worn as a badge ofhonor among many scholars of African

literature today, there has not been a singlescholarly updating of the defense of thatposition; only Chinweizu and co.s book stillremain as the touchstone for the attitude, evenif it is not often cited as such. Again, they lookmuch more vitally engaged with the literatureand criticism of their era, and contributed muchmore to the vitality of the literary criticism oftheir era, than us to our own time today.

One result of the current situation is thatthe most a r res t ing conceptua l andphilosophical engagements with the works of

African writers today often emanate from

outside our field. Widely suggestive andprovocative scholarship on African writers andartists is now more frequently produced bythose who have only a peripheral andtangential connection with the broader field of

African literature. We find ourselves in aposition where those who define the paradigmsby which African cultural production will beevaluated within literary studies writ large, are

from outside the specific field of African literarystudies. Thus, scholars with other areas ofexpertise, and with less socio-contextualfamiliarity with our object of study, areappropriating the literature, speaking for theliterature, and defining the terms on which itwill be admitted within the halls of some larger

entity, whether that entity is called worldliterature as our convener, Bheki Petersonmentioned on Wednesday, or postcolonialliterature, or literature from the global south.

As my co-editor and I stated in our anthologyof criticism and theory (African Literature: An

Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 2007),theory informs all we do, and it does not haveto be inaccessible or unreadable; aversion to

theory is itself a theoretical attitude.What theory needs to do is provideus with principles that can form the

basis for productive engagementswith the range of African literaturetoday.It was Frantz Fanon who said in1961 in The Wretched of the Earththat Every generation must, out ofrelative obscurity, discover itsmission, fulfill it or betray it. Itseems to me that our current crop of

writers, so-called third generation, have, inthe multi-sided capaciousness of theirexplorations of contemporary Africa in theworld and the world in Africa and their own

place in that circulation, it seems to me thatthey have discovered a historic mission and arefulfilling it by pushing the boundaries of what

Africa is and what we could think in relation toAfrica. The question now is: When is Africanliterary criticism going to catch up with itsliterature?

And what is the role of the ALA in all this?

The ALA is an association of scholars,but it is an association of scholars that hasbeen unafraid to wade into treacherous political

waters in the past. When Dennis Brutus ofblessed memory, then in exile in the UnitedStates, urged us to take a stand on apartheidat a time when battles were raging for an andagainst divestment with companies doingbusiness with the apartheid government, the

ALA voted to take a stand. Let me seize theopportunity to pay tribute to the leadership andmembership of ALA at the time and their

4

The ALA is an

association of

scholars, but it is an

association of

scholars that has been

unafraid to wade into

treacherous political

waters in the past.



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willingness to be not only witnesses but alsoparticipants in making history happen whereverthey happened to be located.

We are, as I said, an association ofscholars. This means that in addition to awillingness to act on matters of politics, wemust exhibit a similar readiness to act on

matters of scholarship. We in the ALA, whohave been so willing to confront politicalchallenges head on, ought not to cower withfear when faced with challenges of anintellectual order. In this second decade of thetwenty-first century, the danger that we face asan association is one of growing intellectualirrelevance in the expanding discourse on ourliterature. We cannot allow this to happen.Di%cult as it may be, I would like to issue a callfor the ALA to invest its energies in theproduction of a critical discourse that isadequate to the task of assessing a stylisticallyand thematically diverse output that is now

African literature. We are called upon, not onlyto promote our writers, but also the criticaldiscourse that we generate in relation to thework of those writers. In order to do thise#ectively however, the critical discourse mustexhibit the inventiveness, sophisticatedimagination, and adventure that we see in thecreative writing itself. The critical discourse thatwe develop cannot be built on an ignorance of,or non-engagement with, other discoursesbeing produced around the work of literature

and art in other traditions. Literature andcriticism are locally inspired but are also veryglobal institutions, simultaneously continentaland transcontinental. In any case, asintellectuals and middle class, we travel acrossborders all the time; there is no reason for us toexpect the most relevant ideas about a text tobe found only within borders. To further imprintour expertise on this critical discourse, we asmembers of the ALA will need to incentivizeourselves by o#ering appropriate rewards andrecognition for those who contribute toextending the critical apparatus which frames

our approach to literature.We have at all times been willing and

eager to welcome creative writers in our midst.We have given due recognition. Indeed, the firstprizes created by the ALA were prizes awardedto creative writers on the one hand, andcultural activists on the other. Though the ALAwas founded in 1975, it was not until last year,2013, that we first adopted the idea of awards

for published scholarship. So, for forty years,an association of scholars did not have anysystem of rewards for scholarship. But, betterlate than never; we now have three awards forpublished scholarship, and, with yourdetermination, the sky is the limit.

I understand that the focus on

developing an appropriate critical andtheoretical discourse presents some practicalproblems of access for many of our colleaguesworking in certain parts of the Africancontinent. We cannot be so heavily infatuatedwith developing theory and critical discoursethat we fail to acknowledge the materialconditions which favor scholars working incertain contexts and disable scholars workingin other contexts.$ Let me remind you all of some of thepriorities I outlined in my statement for electionto the position of vice-president. Thesepriorities remain germane as ever.$ My tenure as president is for me anopportunity to work in consolidating ALAsposition as one of the most importantinstitutions invested in all scholarly matterspertaining to African literature, African arts, andcultural production. As President, I will focuson three principal areas that I am convinced weneed to work more on to make our Associationmeet the challenges of the near future.

First, a re-energized membership

drive. African literature is makingwider appearance on college courselists abroad, even if taught in manyinstances by those only partlyimmersed in the field. The e#ect onincreasing student interest has beensignificant. We need to reach outnot just to the traditional categoriesof recruitment targets such asgraduate students and teachersprimarily in the field, but also tothose only peripherally so at themoment. Above all, it is high time

we attract back many of our leadingscholars who have, for one reasonor the other, drifted away from theassociation over the past years. Weneed their wealth of insight,experience, and prestige now morethan ever before.

Second, we need to ramp up ourmentoring of graduate students and

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Presidential Speech cont.Presidential Speech cont.


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junior scholars. This is not simplybecause of the truthful clich thatthey are the future of theorganization. That reason wouldsu%ce just to make the ALA survive.But ALA needs to not just survivebut also thrive competently and in

the front ranks of literary studiestoday. In addition to creatingnurturing intersections in whichstudents, junior and senior scholarslearn from one another (on criticism,pedagogy, etc.) in a multidirectionalmanner, I envision mentoring as alsoincluding research and publishingcollaborations, as well strategicsharing of opportunities and adviceon where to publish. The goal is thatwe in the ALA make much wider

publication appearance everywherebut especially more on the pages ofleading journals and on the list ofleading presses. Again, as ViceChance l lo r Adam Hab ib soperceptively articulated the Africanchallenge today, we must besimultaneously locally relevant andat the same t ime g loba l l ycompetitive. The benefits will beboth ind iv idual profess ionaladvancement and the advancementof the collective profile of our

organization.

Third, we have over the years donevery well both individually andcollectively in donating books touniversities in Africa. Given the ever-increasing cost of books as well asof transcontinental postage, and thefact that donated books are moreoften than not years old, it is time toexplore additional approaches, suchas journals and books in pdf format,for instance. Some presses arealready selling those on cds; theyare much cheaper to buy and tomail. Let us open a formalconversation on this and otherresource support measures.

I want to end by once again thankingour convener and the many hosts and

sponsors. I thank you the entire membershipfor the confidence you reposed in me and Ilook forward for more of your support duringmy tenure. Please re-dedicate yourselves tothe ALA by paying your annual dues promptly,and by inviting potential members to join theorganization. Easter celebration, for instance, isaround the corner, give ALA annualmemberships as gifts to professional friendsand colleagues.

Thank you for attending this conferenceand I wish you all safe travels back to yourvarious destinations. Our next conference is

June 3-6, 2015, at the University of Bayreuth inGermany. I look forward to seeing all of youand many more, there.

It is play time now, so lets dance!April 12, 2014

6Dinner and Conversation following Opening Reception

Olaniyan Presidential speech 2014

Documents

Transcript of Olaniyan Presidential speech 2014