Senayon Olaoluwa
Biographic Data
| ID | 224904 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Senayon Olaoluwa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Senayon |
| FAMILY NAME | Olaoluwa |
| SIGNATURE | OLAOLUWA S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Ibadan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0091-5142 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps…
Responding to Orality in African Literature
This chapter revisits the enduring question of orality in relation to writing in the rendition of modern African literature since the advent of Western colonization. It argues that rather than affirming an artificial binary between orality and writing in the evaluation of African literature, a paradigm of complementarity is advocated. The discussion articulates with Eileen Julien’s formulation on the integrality of orality in written literature a…
Towards a more inclusive diaspora policy orientation in Africa
Since the declaration of the Diaspora as Africa’s sixth region, a process that began with the adoption of the Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union (3q) in 2003, several African nations have responded by making similar declarations, leading to the formulation, adoption and implementation of individual national diaspora policies. The original declaration by the African Union (AU) appears clear in its definition of the…
Extalgia
Since Johannes Hofer's coinage of the term nostalgia in the seventeenth century, which he used to describe the pathological suffering of Swiss soldiers serving abroad, various disciplines engaging with migration and the broad-based discourse of diaspora have focused on this experience to the extent of "theoretical closure." I argue that this discursive strand has prevented a systematic consideration of the simultaneous suffering and creativity th…
Kunle Afolayan, dir. Mokalik. 2019. 100 min. Yoruba. Nigeria. Golden Effects Pictures. No Price Reported
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Nationalism and Exile as Self-Inscription in Micere Mugo's My Mother's Poem and Other Songs
This essay reads Micere Mugo’s collection My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs (1994) as an illustration of self-inscription in nationalism and exile. By paying particular attention to the work’s investment in orature and performance, the paper contests the reductionist critique that ascribes little poetic significance to the collection. The essay concludes that her reflection on nationalism and exile destabilizes the hegemonic construction of home a…
Ecocriticism
This article is an ecocritical reading of Remi Raji's Sea of My Mind (2013). We argue that the collection is a fine illustration of the animist turn in ecocriticism. By engaging with the import of the natural elements that incarnate with the imagination of the sea, we discuss the various ways in which Raji's poetic oeuvres address the environmental exigencies of the times. We also show how the centrality of natural elements in the work pinpoints …
TK at 70
peer reviewed
Beyond Backpacking
The travel legend of Olabisi Ajala in the national and transnational imagination has generated a lot of controversies that thrive on the capacity of rumors to create and sustain legends beyond the material times of their immediate reference. Central to the dispersal of Ajala's legend is the agency of Nigerian popular music that works in a rather antagonistic way to undermine Ajala's scripted perspectives on the travels in his memoir An African Ab…
Environmental Dispossession and Dislocated Fatherhood in Ngũgĩ’s Childhood Memoirs
This paper offers a reading of Ngũgĩ’s childhood memoirs Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter (2012). It tracks a trajectory of the initial model stability and fatherhood of Thiong’o wa Naducu, Ngũgĩ’s father, and argues that Thiong’o’s success in the first phase of his patriarchy is conditioned by his firm control of a vast portion of land acquired and held as his own. It reads the second phase of Thiong’o’s patriar…
We all come from Brahma
By discussing the Nollywood film Indian Doctor (2008), this paper privileges the gradual but sure dispersal of Indian cultural patrimony in Nigeria on account of India's rise as an emerging global power. I argue that by sending a young Nigerian to India to study medicine, the young man who consequently converts to Hinduism, returns to rattle the extant templates of African Traditional Religions and Christianity in the Umuyan Kingdom of Igboland. …
Uneasy Double Attachment
This article reads Olu Oguibe's A Gathering Fear (1992) as an exemplification of the dilemma exiles are confronted with in their relationship with countries of destination and homeland. The article mainstreams the outsider discourse and the contradictions of exiting homeland because of its dystopian conditions only to be faced by situations for which exile becomes less libratory than baleful. To do this, the article highlights the military repres…
Synmemory
This paper proposes the concept of synmemory as a response to the implication of what Edward Said describes as “theoretical closure” for mainstream memory studies that privilege victimhood exclusively from the perspective of the vanquished. Synmemory is defined here as the synthesisation of antagonistic memories to form a traumatic whole. The paper argues that because victory, especially in war and other violent conflicts, is not absolute, synmem…
Singing Peace, Harmonizing Discordant Tunes
Adopting a transnational approach that places Africa at the center of inquiry, this study traces a trajectory of peacebuilding discourse through the music of popular artists African China in Nigeria and Brenda Fassie in South Africa. It adopts a nonlinear, weblike structure that links different national spaces in the discussion of different stages in the peace trajectory. The essay identifies three stages of peacebuilding in the artists’ interven…
Ethnic; or National
Arguments and debates about the appropriate linguistic medium for the expression of African literature continue to be recurrent. One such argument against the literature is the assumption that even at its very best, it can only serve a provincial purpose, as it is ethnic-based. Against this backdrop, the article seeks to tackle the reductionist conception of African literature written in African languages by arguing that in spite of the limits im…
Liberation struggle, memory and freedom in Mongane Serote'sFreedom Lament and Song
Often described as the longest and last struggle against western colonialism on the continent of Africa, the South African liberation history was also characterised by an unparalleled persecution that translated into exile – literal and metaphorical – for both victims and perpetrators alike. It also accounts for why the liberation history provides a strong motivation for reflections on many planes in the wake of the official collapse of apartheid…
What a loss! Modernity in contention in Saheed Osupa's Fuji music
Perhaps modernity's greatest challenge is the simultaneous reception and interrogation that it continues to face in the postcolonial world. If the revolution that the new media engenders as a culmination of modernity is anything to go by, then there is a sense in which it has further facilitated the consolidation of popular music tradition in Africa, especially Nigeria. Nevertheless, the consolidation process of the patronage of modernity in the …
Contentious Absolutism
Much as democratic virtues are crucial to the public sphere, it is not always the case that room is allowed for pluralistic alternative views. Where the space allowed for democratic participation is considered inadequate and unsympathetic to public interests, John Guidry and Mark Sawyer observe, “marginalized groups use a variety of performative and subversive methods to uproot the public sphere from its exclusionary history as they imagine, on t…
In anticipation of tomorrow
In view of the collapse of institutional apartheid, post‐liberation South African literature can be appropriately limned as literature of return, going by the preponderance of its engagement with exile in the years of the struggle. I read Mongane Wally Serote's History is the Home Address (2004) against the backdrop of migration, paying attention to the way the poem anticipates what should be the right attitude of those it may affect, especially …
Urban Legends, Colonial Myths
This book is another welcome development in the study of popular culture in Africa for a number of reasons. One of these is the radical approach it adopts in engaging with the idea of the popular. This is why, for both scholars and general readers, it is likely to become required reading. In their introduction the editors perceptively engage the question of concepts and show how the issues they interrogate chime with the perspective they pursue i…
From Simplicity to Performance
Concubines and Power
Kano's profile as a leading and prosperous city is common knowledge in African scholarship. However, the extent to which royal concubines of slave status contributed to the greatness of this ancient Nigerian city (especially in the pre-colonial era) remains one issue that has for too long been consigned to silence by most of the available works on the city. Heidi Nast's Concubines and Power is an outstanding contribution and a remarkably radical …
Nationalism and Exile as Self-Inscription in Micere Mugo's My Mother's Poem and Other Songs
This essay reads Micere Mugo’s collection My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs (1994) as an illustration of self-inscription in nationalism and exile. By paying particular attention to the work’s investment in orature and performance, the paper contests the reductionist critique that ascribes little poetic significance to the collection. The essay concludes that her reflection on nationalism and exile destabilizes the hegemonic construction of home a…
TK at 70
peer reviewed
Ecocriticism
This article is an ecocritical reading of Remi Raji's Sea of My Mind (2013). We argue that the collection is a fine illustration of the animist turn in ecocriticism. By engaging with the import of the natural elements that incarnate with the imagination of the sea, we discuss the various ways in which Raji's poetic oeuvres address the environmental exigencies of the times. We also show how the centrality of natural elements in the work pinpoints …
We all come from Brahma
By discussing the Nollywood film Indian Doctor (2008), this paper privileges the gradual but sure dispersal of Indian cultural patrimony in Nigeria on account of India's rise as an emerging global power. I argue that by sending a young Nigerian to India to study medicine, the young man who consequently converts to Hinduism, returns to rattle the extant templates of African Traditional Religions and Christianity in the Umuyan Kingdom of Igboland. …
Synmemory
This paper proposes the concept of synmemory as a response to the implication of what Edward Said describes as “theoretical closure” for mainstream memory studies that privilege victimhood exclusively from the perspective of the vanquished. Synmemory is defined here as the synthesisation of antagonistic memories to form a traumatic whole. The paper argues that because victory, especially in war and other violent conflicts, is not absolute, synmem…
From Simplicity to Performance
Concubines and Power
Kano's profile as a leading and prosperous city is common knowledge in African scholarship. However, the extent to which royal concubines of slave status contributed to the greatness of this ancient Nigerian city (especially in the pre-colonial era) remains one issue that has for too long been consigned to silence by most of the available works on the city. Heidi Nast's Concubines and Power is an outstanding contribution and a remarkably radical …
From Simplicity to Performance
Urban Legends, Colonial Myths
This book is another welcome development in the study of popular culture in Africa for a number of reasons. One of these is the radical approach it adopts in engaging with the idea of the popular. This is why, for both scholars and general readers, it is likely to become required reading. In their introduction the editors perceptively engage the question of concepts and show how the issues they interrogate chime with the perspective they pursue i…
In anticipation of tomorrow
In view of the collapse of institutional apartheid, post‐liberation South African literature can be appropriately limned as literature of return, going by the preponderance of its engagement with exile in the years of the struggle. I read Mongane Wally Serote's History is the Home Address (2004) against the backdrop of migration, paying attention to the way the poem anticipates what should be the right attitude of those it may affect, especially …
What a loss! Modernity in contention in Saheed Osupa's Fuji music
Perhaps modernity's greatest challenge is the simultaneous reception and interrogation that it continues to face in the postcolonial world. If the revolution that the new media engenders as a culmination of modernity is anything to go by, then there is a sense in which it has further facilitated the consolidation of popular music tradition in Africa, especially Nigeria. Nevertheless, the consolidation process of the patronage of modernity in the …
Contentious Absolutism
Much as democratic virtues are crucial to the public sphere, it is not always the case that room is allowed for pluralistic alternative views. Where the space allowed for democratic participation is considered inadequate and unsympathetic to public interests, John Guidry and Mark Sawyer observe, “marginalized groups use a variety of performative and subversive methods to uproot the public sphere from its exclusionary history as they imagine, on t…
Ethnic; or National
Arguments and debates about the appropriate linguistic medium for the expression of African literature continue to be recurrent. One such argument against the literature is the assumption that even at its very best, it can only serve a provincial purpose, as it is ethnic-based. Against this backdrop, the article seeks to tackle the reductionist conception of African literature written in African languages by arguing that in spite of the limits im…
Liberation struggle, memory and freedom in Mongane Serote'sFreedom Lament and Song
Often described as the longest and last struggle against western colonialism on the continent of Africa, the South African liberation history was also characterised by an unparalleled persecution that translated into exile – literal and metaphorical – for both victims and perpetrators alike. It also accounts for why the liberation history provides a strong motivation for reflections on many planes in the wake of the official collapse of apartheid…
Singing Peace, Harmonizing Discordant Tunes
Adopting a transnational approach that places Africa at the center of inquiry, this study traces a trajectory of peacebuilding discourse through the music of popular artists African China in Nigeria and Brenda Fassie in South Africa. It adopts a nonlinear, weblike structure that links different national spaces in the discussion of different stages in the peace trajectory. The essay identifies three stages of peacebuilding in the artists’ interven…
Uneasy Double Attachment
This article reads Olu Oguibe's A Gathering Fear (1992) as an exemplification of the dilemma exiles are confronted with in their relationship with countries of destination and homeland. The article mainstreams the outsider discourse and the contradictions of exiting homeland because of its dystopian conditions only to be faced by situations for which exile becomes less libratory than baleful. To do this, the article highlights the military repres…
Synmemory
This paper proposes the concept of synmemory as a response to the implication of what Edward Said describes as “theoretical closure” for mainstream memory studies that privilege victimhood exclusively from the perspective of the vanquished. Synmemory is defined here as the synthesisation of antagonistic memories to form a traumatic whole. The paper argues that because victory, especially in war and other violent conflicts, is not absolute, synmem…
Environmental Dispossession and Dislocated Fatherhood in Ngũgĩ’s Childhood Memoirs
This paper offers a reading of Ngũgĩ’s childhood memoirs Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter (2012). It tracks a trajectory of the initial model stability and fatherhood of Thiong’o wa Naducu, Ngũgĩ’s father, and argues that Thiong’o’s success in the first phase of his patriarchy is conditioned by his firm control of a vast portion of land acquired and held as his own. It reads the second phase of Thiong’o’s patriar…
We all come from Brahma
By discussing the Nollywood film Indian Doctor (2008), this paper privileges the gradual but sure dispersal of Indian cultural patrimony in Nigeria on account of India's rise as an emerging global power. I argue that by sending a young Nigerian to India to study medicine, the young man who consequently converts to Hinduism, returns to rattle the extant templates of African Traditional Religions and Christianity in the Umuyan Kingdom of Igboland. …
Beyond Backpacking
The travel legend of Olabisi Ajala in the national and transnational imagination has generated a lot of controversies that thrive on the capacity of rumors to create and sustain legends beyond the material times of their immediate reference. Central to the dispersal of Ajala's legend is the agency of Nigerian popular music that works in a rather antagonistic way to undermine Ajala's scripted perspectives on the travels in his memoir An African Ab…
Nationalism and Exile as Self-Inscription in Micere Mugo's My Mother's Poem and Other Songs
This essay reads Micere Mugo’s collection My Mother’s Poem and Other Songs (1994) as an illustration of self-inscription in nationalism and exile. By paying particular attention to the work’s investment in orature and performance, the paper contests the reductionist critique that ascribes little poetic significance to the collection. The essay concludes that her reflection on nationalism and exile destabilizes the hegemonic construction of home a…
Ecocriticism
This article is an ecocritical reading of Remi Raji's Sea of My Mind (2013). We argue that the collection is a fine illustration of the animist turn in ecocriticism. By engaging with the import of the natural elements that incarnate with the imagination of the sea, we discuss the various ways in which Raji's poetic oeuvres address the environmental exigencies of the times. We also show how the centrality of natural elements in the work pinpoints …
TK at 70
peer reviewed
Kunle Afolayan, dir. Mokalik. 2019. 100 min. Yoruba. Nigeria. Golden Effects Pictures. No Price Reported
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Extalgia
Since Johannes Hofer's coinage of the term nostalgia in the seventeenth century, which he used to describe the pathological suffering of Swiss soldiers serving abroad, various disciplines engaging with migration and the broad-based discourse of diaspora have focused on this experience to the extent of "theoretical closure." I argue that this discursive strand has prevented a systematic consideration of the simultaneous suffering and creativity th…
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps…
Responding to Orality in African Literature
This chapter revisits the enduring question of orality in relation to writing in the rendition of modern African literature since the advent of Western colonization. It argues that rather than affirming an artificial binary between orality and writing in the evaluation of African literature, a paradigm of complementarity is advocated. The discussion articulates with Eileen Julien’s formulation on the integrality of orality in written literature a…
Towards a more inclusive diaspora policy orientation in Africa
Since the declaration of the Diaspora as Africa’s sixth region, a process that began with the adoption of the Protocol on Amendments to the Constitutive Act of the African Union (3q) in 2003, several African nations have responded by making similar declarations, leading to the formulation, adoption and implementation of individual national diaspora policies. The original declaration by the African Union (AU) appears clear in its definition of the…
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Art (12 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (11 works) · History (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Literature (9 works) · African history and culture studies (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)