Obi Nwakanma
Biographic Data
| ID | 629851 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Obi Nwakanma |
| GIVEN NAMES | Obi |
| FAMILY NAME | Nwakanma |
| SIGNATURE | NWAKANMA O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Central Florida |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5231-439X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Harlem, the “New Negro,” and the cultural roots of Azikiwe's nationalist politics
“Harlem, the New Negro, and the cultural roots of Nnamdi Azikiwe's Nationalism” The anti‐colonial nationalist movement was staged at two levels: the first was at the level of political nationalism and the second is at the level of cultural nationalism. Decolonization required the re‐awakening of consciousness and an affirmation of a precolonial past by its invocation through music, folklore, poetry, and the performative process. Colonialism had c…
The Nation and the Subaltern in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning
Yvonne Vera’s death in 2005 brought to a tragic close the career of one of Zimbabwe’s, indeed Africa’s, more engaging contemporary writers. But her powerful novel, Butterfly Burning continues to mirror an aspect of Vera’s enduring concern: the place of African women in the context of power both within the colonial and the postcolonial moments. This image of the “woman in shadows” also resonates in the kernel of the subaltern subject in Spivak’s e…
MJC Echeruo
Michael Chukwudalu Echeruo’s trajectories are broad and complex: poet, literary critic, and scholar, Echeruo is quite easily one of the most vital and one of the most accomplished of modern African literary theorists and practitioners. As a poet, Echeruo’s style is considered difficult and arcane, and it left most critics of modern African poetry, like Chinweizu, Madubuike, and Jemie, very distraught with what they discerned as “Hopkins disease.”…
The Fishmonger's Boy
Ariri shook the dice vigorously in his cupped palm and threw them down on the broken concrete surface. He watched the dice roll till they stopped just about an inch from the foot of a man who clutched a black leatherbound Bible. He could have been young. Possibly in his midthirties. A visor cap shielded him from closer scrutiny. He wore a brown corduroy jacket over a white T-shirt that had once made a bold claim: Love New York. The T-shirt, now w…
There Was a Country
154 World Literature Today reviews me from myself.” In both cases, the length of the line is more than a stylistic tic; it is thematically essential to most of Williams’s poems. Matching length of line to length of life, Williams writes with humor and poignancy about aging, as in the moving and bold “Salt,” in which he admits to finding it “Abashingly eerie that just because I’m here on the long low-tide beach of age with briny time / licking ins…
Poems for Césaire
Poems for Césaire Obi Nwakanma (bio) i Ogoloma—the birds— Your kinsmen are fleeing Home. The market is burning And the shrinehouse has fallen. ii Do not return to a place Of emptiness; do not be found In the forests when the axe Of sunlight falls on the cedars. iii For those hauled over the Heavy swell, there is always behind The wall, a moment of silence, To remember a place hungry for itself. iv Raise your voice at last Above the cyclone: and f…
The Image Maker
Metonymic Eruptions
Nigeria’s postcolonial nationality has been marked by disjunctions that continue to highlight its character, as a product of the colonial will, and of what Biodun Jeyifo has articulated as “arrested decolonization”—the basis of its problematic modernity. Nigeria is, in its current formation, a hybrid state; a nation of multiple nations coalescing to form the basis of nationness and national belonging. One of the fundamental sources of its evoluti…
From the September Quartet
from the September Quartet Obi Nwakanma (bio) iii I live among the poor in spirit – thedying – among the meek, theinheritors of the earth: I livewith my neighbour, the fishseller,possessed by the song: I live with the wounded,the dispossessed; those aching for freedom,bound in spirit by too much love: I live with thefisherman, who ploughs the water, the mist upon hisheels, arriving before the light is glimpsed through thedark curtain, with seashe…
Ezenwa-Ohaeto
Okigbo Agonistes
Among Africa's leading twentieth-century poets, Christopher Okigbo occupies a most interesting space. Born to Igbo Roman Catholic parents in Eastern Nigeria, Okigbo studied the Classics and began to write poetry as a means of re-identification with his primal world. Yet both his life and his poetry staked a claim to a universalist impulse, and, as a colonial subject interpreting the postcolonial moment, Okigbo rejected a narrow, essentialist cate…
Metonymic Eruptions
Nigeria’s postcolonial nationality has been marked by disjunctions that continue to highlight its character, as a product of the colonial will, and of what Biodun Jeyifo has articulated as “arrested decolonization”—the basis of its problematic modernity. Nigeria is, in its current formation, a hybrid state; a nation of multiple nations coalescing to form the basis of nationness and national belonging. One of the fundamental sources of its evoluti…
Harlem, the “New Negro,” and the cultural roots of Azikiwe's nationalist politics
“Harlem, the New Negro, and the cultural roots of Nnamdi Azikiwe's Nationalism” The anti‐colonial nationalist movement was staged at two levels: the first was at the level of political nationalism and the second is at the level of cultural nationalism. Decolonization required the re‐awakening of consciousness and an affirmation of a precolonial past by its invocation through music, folklore, poetry, and the performative process. Colonialism had c…
The Nation and the Subaltern in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning
Yvonne Vera’s death in 2005 brought to a tragic close the career of one of Zimbabwe’s, indeed Africa’s, more engaging contemporary writers. But her powerful novel, Butterfly Burning continues to mirror an aspect of Vera’s enduring concern: the place of African women in the context of power both within the colonial and the postcolonial moments. This image of the “woman in shadows” also resonates in the kernel of the subaltern subject in Spivak’s e…
MJC Echeruo
Michael Chukwudalu Echeruo’s trajectories are broad and complex: poet, literary critic, and scholar, Echeruo is quite easily one of the most vital and one of the most accomplished of modern African literary theorists and practitioners. As a poet, Echeruo’s style is considered difficult and arcane, and it left most critics of modern African poetry, like Chinweizu, Madubuike, and Jemie, very distraught with what they discerned as “Hopkins disease.”…
Okigbo Agonistes
Among Africa's leading twentieth-century poets, Christopher Okigbo occupies a most interesting space. Born to Igbo Roman Catholic parents in Eastern Nigeria, Okigbo studied the Classics and began to write poetry as a means of re-identification with his primal world. Yet both his life and his poetry staked a claim to a universalist impulse, and, as a colonial subject interpreting the postcolonial moment, Okigbo rejected a narrow, essentialist cate…
Ezenwa-Ohaeto
Metonymic Eruptions
Nigeria’s postcolonial nationality has been marked by disjunctions that continue to highlight its character, as a product of the colonial will, and of what Biodun Jeyifo has articulated as “arrested decolonization”—the basis of its problematic modernity. Nigeria is, in its current formation, a hybrid state; a nation of multiple nations coalescing to form the basis of nationness and national belonging. One of the fundamental sources of its evoluti…
From the September Quartet
from the September Quartet Obi Nwakanma (bio) iii I live among the poor in spirit – thedying – among the meek, theinheritors of the earth: I livewith my neighbour, the fishseller,possessed by the song: I live with the wounded,the dispossessed; those aching for freedom,bound in spirit by too much love: I live with thefisherman, who ploughs the water, the mist upon hisheels, arriving before the light is glimpsed through thedark curtain, with seashe…
The Image Maker
There Was a Country
154 World Literature Today reviews me from myself.” In both cases, the length of the line is more than a stylistic tic; it is thematically essential to most of Williams’s poems. Matching length of line to length of life, Williams writes with humor and poignancy about aging, as in the moving and bold “Salt,” in which he admits to finding it “Abashingly eerie that just because I’m here on the long low-tide beach of age with briny time / licking ins…
Poems for Césaire
Poems for Césaire Obi Nwakanma (bio) i Ogoloma—the birds— Your kinsmen are fleeing Home. The market is burning And the shrinehouse has fallen. ii Do not return to a place Of emptiness; do not be found In the forests when the axe Of sunlight falls on the cedars. iii For those hauled over the Heavy swell, there is always behind The wall, a moment of silence, To remember a place hungry for itself. iv Raise your voice at last Above the cyclone: and f…
The Fishmonger's Boy
Ariri shook the dice vigorously in his cupped palm and threw them down on the broken concrete surface. He watched the dice roll till they stopped just about an inch from the foot of a man who clutched a black leatherbound Bible. He could have been young. Possibly in his midthirties. A visor cap shielded him from closer scrutiny. He wore a brown corduroy jacket over a white T-shirt that had once made a bold claim: Love New York. The T-shirt, now w…
MJC Echeruo
Michael Chukwudalu Echeruo’s trajectories are broad and complex: poet, literary critic, and scholar, Echeruo is quite easily one of the most vital and one of the most accomplished of modern African literary theorists and practitioners. As a poet, Echeruo’s style is considered difficult and arcane, and it left most critics of modern African poetry, like Chinweizu, Madubuike, and Jemie, very distraught with what they discerned as “Hopkins disease.”…
Harlem, the “New Negro,” and the cultural roots of Azikiwe's nationalist politics
“Harlem, the New Negro, and the cultural roots of Nnamdi Azikiwe's Nationalism” The anti‐colonial nationalist movement was staged at two levels: the first was at the level of political nationalism and the second is at the level of cultural nationalism. Decolonization required the re‐awakening of consciousness and an affirmation of a precolonial past by its invocation through music, folklore, poetry, and the performative process. Colonialism had c…
The Nation and the Subaltern in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning
Yvonne Vera’s death in 2005 brought to a tragic close the career of one of Zimbabwe’s, indeed Africa’s, more engaging contemporary writers. But her powerful novel, Butterfly Burning continues to mirror an aspect of Vera’s enduring concern: the place of African women in the context of power both within the colonial and the postcolonial moments. This image of the “woman in shadows” also resonates in the kernel of the subaltern subject in Spivak’s e…
Art (11 works) · History (10 works) · Literature (9 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (8 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Poetry (5 works)