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Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English is a theoretical and analytical survey of the poetry that emerged in Nigeria in the 1980s. Hurt into poetry, the poets collectively raise aesthetics of resistance that dramatises the nationalist imagination bridging the gap between poetry and politics in Nigeria. The emerging generation of poetic voices raises an outcry against the repressive military regimes of the 1980s and 1990s. Ingrained in the tradition of protest literature in Africa, the third-generation poetry is presented here as part of the cultural struggles that unseat military despotism and envis-age a democratic society.
Not only does Egya place emphasis on the poetry's interaction with the culture and history of military oppression in Nigeria − an interaction that sees the poetry not only feeding from the history but also feeding it; he also contextual-ises the generational consciousness of these poets. Scholars of Nigerian litera-ture, African literature, and researchers interested in world literatures will welcome Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English as an invaluable contribution to indigenous knowledge, critical studies in Africa, and the rehabilitation and production of an African aesthetic.
About Sule E. Egya
Sule E. Egya is associate professor in the Department of English, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. His research interests include the intersection of literature and politics in Africa, feminism, cultural studies, and ecocriticism. He is the author of Poetics of Rage: A Reading of Remi Raji's Poetry, The Writings of Zaynab Alkali, and In Their Voices and Visions: Conversations with New Nigerian Writers. He is also a creative writer. His novel Sterile Sky won the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize for the Africa Region. His poetry volumes include What the Sea Told Me (winner of the ANA Gabriel Okara Prize), Naked Sun, and Kni�ng Tongues.
About the Series
Series editors: Kwesi Yankah & Fred Hendricks
The African Humanities Series is a partnership between Unisa Press and the African Humanities Program of the American Council of Learned Societies. The African Humanities Series covers topics in African histories, languages, literatures, and cultures. Submissions are solicited from Fellows of the African Humanities Program (AHP), which is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies and �nancially supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The purpose of the AHP is to encourage and enable production of new knowledge by Africans in the �ve countries designated by Carnegie Corporation: Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. AHP fellowships support one year’s work free from teaching and other responsibilities to allow the Fellow to complete the project proposed. Successfully completed manuscripts are submitted to the AHP editorial board, which chooses manuscripts to be forwarded to UNISA Press. In some cases, the AHP board will commission substantive editing and/or re-organisation of manuscripts. The African Humanities Series aims to publish works of the highest quality that will foreground the best research being done by emerging scholars (within �ve years of receiving their Ph.D. degree, which is the AHP’s eligibility requirement). The rigorous selection process before the fellowship award, as well as AHP editorial vetting of manuscripts, assures attention to quality. Books in the series are intended to speak to scholars in Africa as well as in other world areas. The AHP is also committed to providing a copy of each publication in the series to every university library in Africa.
UN
ISA PRESS
Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation
Nigerian Poetryin English
Sule E. Egya
Sule E. EgyaN
ation, Power and D
issidence in Third G
eneration Nigerian Poetry in English
African Humanities Series
Introductionof the
The African Humanities Series is a partnership between Unisa Press and the African Humanities Program of the American Council of Learned Societies. The series covers topics in African histories, languages, literatures, and cultures. Submissions have been solicited from Fellows of the African Humanities Program (AHP), which is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies and financially supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. More than 100 African scholars participate as Fellows in the AHP, whose purpose is to encourage and enable the production of new knowledge by Africans in the five countries designated by the Carnegie Corporation: Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.
The African Humanities Series aims to publish work of the highest quality that will foreground the best research being done by emerging scholars (within five years of receiving their Ph.D. degree). Books in the series are intended to speak to scholars in Africa as well as in other world areas. The first three books in the series, namely Gender Terrains in African Cinema by Sr Dominica Dipio; What the forest told me: Yoruba hunter, culture and narrative performance by Dr Ayo Adeduntan and Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English by Dr Sule E. Egya demonstrate that commitment and will contribute in a very direct and significant way, to the development and status of the Program and the Series.
Unisa’s vision to be “the African university in the service of humanity”, suggests that the partnership between Unisa and the African Humanities Program was inevitable. Our vision expresses our commitment to the African continent and its people in a manner that transcends language and cultural barriers, and celebrates and promotes African arts and culture. The African Humanities Series project is being driven by Unisa’s Research and Innovation Portfolio, whose research initiatives strive, amongst others, to find answers to Africa’s educational and developmental problems. Similarly, and in a complementary manner, the AHP’s purpose is to encourage and enable the production of new knowledge in Africa by Africans, thus ensuring that our partnership will further these aims. The partnership with Unisa Press, the largest university press in Africa, plays an important role in effectively promoting accessibility to, and the dissemination and development of knowledge and research outputs, as well as supporting the lifelong learning that the AHP embodies.
Unisa is honoured to launch this series and to be making a seminal contribution to the growth and development of authentically African scholarship and knowledge production.
Prof M Makhanya, Principal And Vice ChancellorUniversity Of South Africa
Welcome
The African Humanities Series is a partnership between Unisa Press and the African Humanities Program of the American Council of Learned Societies. The series covers topics in African histories, languages, literatures, and cultures. Submissions are solicited from Fellows of the African Humanities Program (AHP), which is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies and financially supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. There are over 100 African scholars participating as Fellows in the AHP.
The purpose of the AHP is to encourage and enable production of new knowledge by Africans in the five countries designated by Carnegie Corporation: Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. AHP fellowships support one year’s work, free from teaching and other responsibilities, to allow the Fellow to complete the project proposed.
Successfully completed manuscripts are submitted to the AHP editorial board, which chooses manuscripts to be forwarded to UNISA Press. In some cases, the AHP board will commission substantive editing and/or re-organisation of manuscripts.
The African Humanities Series aims to publish work of the highest quality that will foreground the best research being done by emerging scholars (within five years of receiving their Ph.D. degree, which is the AHP eligibility requirement). The rigorous selection process before the fellowship award, as well as AHP editorial vetting of manuscripts, assures attention to quality. Books in the series are intended to speak to scholars in Africa as well as in other world areas.
The AHP is also committed to providing a copy of each publication in the series to every university library in Africa.
Series Editors Kwesi Yankah, co-editor of the African Humanities Series as President of the Central University College, and Chairman of the Council of Independent Universities, Ghana. Fred Hendricks, co-editor of the African Humanities Series, Dean of Humanities, Rhodes University, South Africa.
African Humanities SeriesAbout the About the African Humanities Program
The American Council of Learned Societies, with financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, seeks to revitalize the humanities in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda through fellowship competitions, research and writing residencies, writing workshops, and the African Humanities Series, a publication initiative published with Unisa Press. Fellowship awards to promising African scholars are the centerpiece of the AHP. Approximately 40 such fellowships are awarded annually.
• Dissertation-completion Fellowships in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda for those in the final year of completing the Ph.D.
• Early-career Postdoctoral Fellowships in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and South Africa for scholars eight or fewer years past the Ph.D.
African Humanities Program in Numbers (2008-2013) 1073 Applications
190 Fellows57 Dissertation Fellowships
133 Postdoctoral Fellowships109 Fellow Residential Awards
8 Residential centers for advanced study available for Fellow residencies:• International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures, Institutions and Economic
Enterprise, Ghana• University of Ibadan, Nigeria• University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania• School of Languages, Literature, and Communication at Makerere University, Uganda• School of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University, Uganda• Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa• Rhodes University, South Africa• West African Research Centre, Senegal
9 African Humanities Program/African Studies Association Presidential Fellows91 Peer reviewers14 Senior scholars’ travel grants for mentoring40 Competition launch/application workshop meetings at 18 African universities
5 Manuscript development workshops for Fellows3 Books published in the African Humanities Series
For more information on the AHP, please visit the ACLS website: www.acls.org/programs/ahp or send an email to [email protected] with the vibrant AHP community online on the program’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ACLS.AHP
About the AuthorAyo Adeduntan was educated at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and University of Ibadan. He obtained a Bachelor’s degree in literature from Obafemi Awolowo University, and Master of Arts in the same discipline from the University of Ibadan. He completed his PhD in Cultural and Performance Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan.
Since 2010, he has been teaching in method and
Title: Gender Terrains in African CinemaAuthor: Prof Dominica DipioPublished: June 2014ISBN: : 978-1-86888-735-4Number of pages: 242ppPrices: South Africa: R320 (incl VAT) | Africa: R351 | USD: $35 | GBP: £21 | Euro: €26
Title: What the forest told me: Yoruba hunter, culture and narrative performance
Author: Dr Ayo AdeduntanPublished: June 2014ISBN: 978-1-86888-739-2Number of pages: 150ppPrices: South Africa: R230 (incl VAT) | Africa: R242 | USD: $24 | GBP: £15 | Euro: €16
theory of field investigation; gender, ideology and performance; performance theory; prospects and problem of performance research, and indigenous approach to conflict resolution at the Institute of African Studies, Ibadan. He has published articles in Text Performance Studies Quarterly, African Notes, as well as chapters in various books. With Ohioma Pogoson, he is currently editing a volume of essays entitled ‘Culture and Society in Postcolonial Nigeria’. His current research activities focus on how 20th-century and 21st-century urban performance forms exploit indigenous African codes.
About the BookStudies of Yoruba culture and performance tend to focus mainly on standardised forms of performance, and ignore the more prevalent performance culture which is central to everyday life. What the forest told me conveys the elastic nature of African cultural expression through narratives of the Yoruba hunters’ exploits. Hunters’ narratives provide a window on the Yoruba understanding and explanation of their world, a cosmology that negates the anthropocentric view of creation. In a very literal sense man, in this peculiar world, is equal actor with animal and nature spirits with whom he constantly contests and negotiates space.
Adeduntan offers new insights into key aspects of Yoruba culture, while providing a close appraisal of particular texts and contexts of oral performance forms. In doing so, he presents a fresh view of the poetics of oral performance, rising above generalisation and mere description.
“I have been very much enlightened by this book. Adeduntan has a magisterial command of his primary materials, and his critical and theoretical explorations are wide, deep, and sophisticated. There is no doubt about it: this is an exemplary model for a new Yoruba studies. It is, like the composite image of the hunter, a muscular herald of a new conceptually capacious direction in the study of African oral tradition, performance, and narrative, and in African cultural studies in general.” — Tejumola Olaniyan, Louise Durham Mead Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.
About the AuthorDominica Dipio is an Associate Professor of literature and film based in Makerere University, Kampala, where she obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Literature. Her Licentiate in Social Communications and PhD in Film Studies, specialising in African Cinema, are from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. She has been the Chair of the Department of Literature from 2007–2012. Dipio has won a number of research grants, top among them are the Fulbright Research Fellowship (2012–2013); the Africa Humanities Program (AHP)
Fellowship that recognises excellent research in Humanities (2009); and the Makerere-Bergen Foklore Project (2007–2012) where she has been a lead researcher and coordinator. Among the recognitions she has received is a nomination among high achieving women in Uganda whose stories are profiled in a book, Footmarks Scaling Heights: Conversations with Women of Purpose in Uganda (2014). She is also a recipient of the Authorship and Legal Deposit Award of Makerere University (2009), and the Art Press Association (APA) Award for her first feature film, ‘A Meal to Forget’ (2009).
Dipio has several publications in her research fields of film, literature, folklore and cultural studies, with gender as a cross-cutting interest in her writings. Two of her co-edited five books are: Performing Wisdom: Proverbial Lore in Modern Ugandan Society, MATATU 42 (2013); Traditional Wisdom: Folktales from Uganda, CMK (2012). Some of her book chapters and journal articles include: ‘A Historical Overview of Ugandan Film Industry’, ‘Cambridge Scholars’ (2014); and ‘Audience Pleasure and Nollywood Popularity in Uganda: An Assessment’, JAC (2014).
About the BookGender Terrains in African Cinema reflects on a body of canonical African filmmakers who address a trajectory of pertinent social issues. Dipio analyses gender relations around three categories of female characters – the girl child, the young woman and the elderly woman and their male counterparts. Although gender remains the focal point in this lucid and fascinating text, Dipio engages attention in her discussion of African feminism in relation to Western feminism. With its broad appeal to African humanities, Gender Terrains in African Cinema stands as a unique and radical contribution to the field of (African) film studies, which until now, has suffered from a paucity of scholarship.
ISBN 978-1-86888-759-0
Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English is a theoretical and analytical survey of the poetry that emerged in Nigeria in the 1980s. Hurt into poetry, the poets collectively raise aesthetics of resistance that dramatises the nationalist imagination bridging the gap between poetry and politics in Nigeria. The emerging generation of poetic voices raises an outcry against the repressive military regimes of the 1980s and 1990s. Ingrained in the tradition of protest literature in Africa, the third-generation poetry is presented here as part of the cultural struggles that unseat military despotism and envis-age a democratic society.
Not only does Egya place emphasis on the poetry's interaction with the culture and history of military oppression in Nigeria − an interaction that sees the poetry not only feeding from the history but also feeding it; he also contextual-ises the generational consciousness of these poets. Scholars of Nigerian litera-ture, African literature, and researchers interested in world literatures will welcome Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English as an invaluable contribution to indigenous knowledge, critical studies in Africa, and the rehabilitation and production of an African aesthetic.
About Sule E. Egya
Sule E. Egya is associate professor in the Department of English, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. His research interests include the intersection of literature and politics in Africa, feminism, cultural studies, and ecocriticism. He is the author of Poetics of Rage: A Reading of Remi Raji's Poetry, The Writings of Zaynab Alkali, and In Their Voices and Visions: Conversations with New Nigerian Writers. He is also a creative writer. His novel Sterile Sky won the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize for the Africa Region. His poetry volumes include What the Sea Told Me (winner of the ANA Gabriel Okara Prize), Naked Sun, and Kni�ng Tongues.
About the Series
Series editors: Kwesi Yankah & Fred Hendricks
The African Humanities Series is a partnership between Unisa Press and the African Humanities Program of the American Council of Learned Societies. The African Humanities Series covers topics in African histories, languages, literatures, and cultures. Submissions are solicited from Fellows of the African Humanities Program (AHP), which is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies and �nancially supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The purpose of the AHP is to encourage and enable production of new knowledge by Africans in the �ve countries designated by Carnegie Corporation: Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. AHP fellowships support one year’s work free from teaching and other responsibilities to allow the Fellow to complete the project proposed. Successfully completed manuscripts are submitted to the AHP editorial board, which chooses manuscripts to be forwarded to UNISA Press. In some cases, the AHP board will commission substantive editing and/or re-organisation of manuscripts. The African Humanities Series aims to publish works of the highest quality that will foreground the best research being done by emerging scholars (within �ve years of receiving their Ph.D. degree, which is the AHP’s eligibility requirement). The rigorous selection process before the fellowship award, as well as AHP editorial vetting of manuscripts, assures attention to quality. Books in the series are intended to speak to scholars in Africa as well as in other world areas. The AHP is also committed to providing a copy of each publication in the series to every university library in Africa.
UN
ISA PRESS
Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation
Nigerian Poetryin English
Sule E. Egya
Sule E. EgyaN
ation, Power and D
issidence in Third G
eneration Nigerian Poetry in English
Title: Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in EnglishAuthor: Dr Sule E. EgyaPublished: June 2014ISBN: 978-1-86888-759-0Number of pages: 186ppPrices: South Africa: R150 (incl VAT) | Africa: R172 | USD: $18 | GBP: £11 | Euro: €13
About the AuthorSule E. Egya is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria. His research interests include the intersection of literature and politics in Africa, feminism, cultural studies, and ecocriticism. He is the author of Poetics of Rage: A Reading of Remi Raji’s Poetry, The Writings of Zaynab Alkali, and In Their Voices and Visions: Conversations with New Nigerian Writers. He is also a creative writer. His novel Sterile Sky won the 2013 Commonwealth Book
Prize for the Africa Region. His poetry volumes include ‘What the Sea Told Me’ (winner of the ANA Gabriel Okara Prize), ‘Naked Sun’, and ‘Kning Tongues’.
About the BookNation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English is a theoretical and analytical survey of the poetry that emerged in Nigeria in the 1980s. Hurt into poetry, the poets collectively raise aesthetics of resistance that dramatises the nationalist imagination bridging the gap between poetry and politics in Nigeria. The emerging generation of poetic voices raises an outcry against the repressive military regimes of the 1980s and 1990s. Ingrained in the tradition of protest literature in Africa, the third-generation poetry is presented here as part of the cultural struggles that unseat military despotism and envisage a democratic society.
Not only does Egya place emphasis on the poetry’s interaction with the culture and history of military oppression in Nigeria − an interaction that sees the poetry not only feeding from the history but also feeding it; he also contextualises the generational consciousness of these poets. Scholars of Nigerian literature, African literature, and researchers interested in world literatures will welcome Nation, Power and Dissidence in Third Generation Nigerian Poetry in English as an invaluable contribution to indigenous knowledge, critical studies in Africa, and the rehabilitation and production of an African aesthetic.
The books published in this series will be distributed to selected university libraries. Some of the books will be co-published with international University Presses to ensure that the books are widely distributed. The books are published and sold by Unisa Press, and members of the public, bookstores and students can order books directly from Unisa Press.
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