Adeleke Adeeko
Biographic Data
| ID | 75768 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adeleke Adeeko |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adeleke |
| FAMILY NAME | Adeeko |
| SIGNATURE | ADEEKO A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
"Befitting Burial", or Conviviality in the Work of Mourning
Decolonization without a linguistic turn is like drinking sugar without tea: Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì
This article interpretes highlights of the intellectual legacies of Ọlábíyìí Yáì (1939–2020), Beninois/Yorùbá, linguist and literary theorist, as revealing expressions of the autonomy strivings of the first generation of university based African scholars in the westernized academy. The “linguistic turn” group of scholars to which Yáì belonged pioneered a rigorous, systematic, ordinary language analysis of Afriphonic speech and cultural pragmatics…
Institutions of African literature: Introduction
“Institutions of African Literature” was the theme of the 45th annual conference and meeting of the African Literature Association, held May 15–19, 2019, in Columbus, Ohio. Articles in this cluster
Introduction: Abiola Irele, critical master, master critic
The following cluster of articles on the intellectual legacies of Professor Francis Abiola Irele (1936-2017) started as contributions to a memorial seminar during the 44th annual meeting and confer
Postcolonial Critique in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther
The article addresses two aspects of postcolonial critique in Black Panther : first, its portrayal of the allure of grand statements in the cultivation of conspicuous and persistent self-regard in societies that wish to be recognizably independent, and second the centrality of repeatedly embodied material gestures and motions for the sustenance of enduring communal self-regard. These two prominent features of storytelling in the film, it will be …
If only journals could talk: Abiola Irele’s “contemplative vitalism”
This study locates and names as “contemplative vitalism” the nucleus of Abiola Irele's massive analyses of the complex trajectories of Africa-inflected 20th century intellectual history, particularly in literature and culture. The peculiar strain of the will to persist freely which the historical environment imposes on the African requires that the artist and thinker be bound involuntarily–vitally–to the surrounding that must be embraced critical…
Could anything under the sky be truly new
Panegyric
Panegyric Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ (bio) In "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty" (1768), Phillis Wheatley commemorated George III thus after the repealing of the Stamp Act: Your subjects hope, dread Sire—The crown upon your brows may flourish long,And that your arm may in your God be strong!O may your sceptre num'rous nations sway,And all with love and readiness obey!1 No Nigerian literate in English language would miss the similarities between keyword…
Jeyifo's turns of epigraphic traditions in “Talakawa Liberation Courier/Herald”
Biodun Jeyifo's newspaper column writing provokes a new understanding of leftist praxis in Nigeria in two ways: first, the frequent quotation of proverbs and apothegms brings an uncommon ideological perspective to African ordinary language analysis; second, the sayings are used in remarkably unprecedented manners to subtend the formulation of an activist ethics termed ìwàlẹ̀sìn (conducts of being manifest spirit)
Poetry, print, and the making of postcolonial literature
Christopher Okigbo is at the center of this book that binds, with more than the bare fact of English as the writers’ common literary language, J.P. Clark Bekederemo, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, D
The Spell That Fails Lacks an Essential Term: Poetry, Animism, and Ideophones
Books: Review Forum
Okonkwo, Textual Closure, Colonial Conquest
The paper proposes an intertextual reading of narrative and performance closure in four Nigerian end-of-era stories about colonial conquest (Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God , Flora Nwapa’s Efuru , and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman ), focusing mainly on the meaning of the use of suicide, or the resolution of its threat, as a strategy ofending conflicts created directly by the enforcement of colonial rule or indire…
Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa
Book Review| March 01 2011 Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa La Vinia DeloisToni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 257 pp. $35.99. Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ Ohio State University Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is a professor in the departments of English and African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998)…
Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther
This paper analyzes the impact of the determining circumstances of slavery and conversion to Christianity on how Philip Quaque, Phillis Wheatley, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther—missionaries and emancipated slaves from West Africa who wrote on their Atlantic experiences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—conceived Africa and Africans. It is proposed that the grand historiographic resistance/domination theme that is typically applied …
Power Shift: America in the New Nigerian Imagination
In the last five years, novelists of Nigerian descent have been making attention gathering waves in Anglophone writing circles with prize winning stories driven by topics that do not quite fit the postcolonial problematic as it has been conceived in the past two decades. The dominant characters in these earnest novels suffer no debilitating psychological angst about the singular and unified nature of their being and destiny within a modern nation…
Specterless Spirits/Spiritless Specters: Magical Realism's Two Faces
The paper proposes that the narrative functions of magical transformations and the characters' articulated beliefs in the ways of spirits and ghosts in Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World and Ben Okri's The Famished Road represent polar extremes in magical realist writing. In the former text, spirits serve as the main measure of responsibility and responsiveness, enabling social actors to plot the ordinarily unimaginable. Spectral bodies…
Kò Sóhun tí Mbe tí ò Nítàn (Nothing Is that Lacks a [Hi]story): On Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí’s
For questioning many governing axioms of African gender studies, Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women: Making an African sense of Western Gender Discourses often elicits strong reactions from its readers. The book asserts forcefully that scholars of gender in Africa, especially Yorùbá societies, fit their observed facts to learned western notions about women with little regard for the social history of their subjects of study. The book also …
Symptoms of the Present in Ato Quayson's Calibrations
Ato Quayson's Calibrations adds a crucial volume to the expanding library of Africa-inflected theoretical apprehensions of the present. Achille Mbembe's provocative ruminations on the macabre state of the African present, On the Postcolony, appeared 2001. Olakunle George's compelling work on the proper way to account for the modernity of the African postcolonial subject, Relocating Agency, appeared two years later. All these writers find contempo…
Oral Poetry and Hegemony: Yorùbá Oríkì
Signatures of blood in William Wells Brown's Clotel
(1999). Signatures of blood in William Wells Brown's Clotel. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 115-134
Theory and Practice in African Orature
Micere Mugo's two most recent books bring together the diverse and criticism of African orature?the creative and imagi? native art of composition that relies on verbal art for communica? tion and that culminates in performance. Her theory book, African Orature and Human Rights, uses an aesthetic analysis of the narrative arts of the Ndia people of Kirinyaga District of Kenya to describe the relationship of arts and rights in an orate society. In …
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and State in Africa
Preface Introduction 1. Art War with the State: Writers and Guardians of a Postcolonial Society 2. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: The Conflict Between the Crafts of Art and the State 3. Enacting Power: The Politics of the Performance State 4. Voicing Silence: Language, Democracy, and a New World Order 5. Renaissance or Orature: Freeing Creativity from the Literary Colonisation of Orality Conclusion
Differences in memoriam: De Man, Derrida, and literary semiology
Post‐structuralist thought queries the gesture by which linguistics‐based semiology equates elements of language with linguisticity itself. Instead of conceiving literature as a mere linguistic transformation whose lack of “worldly” contents marks it off as a “special” use of language, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida employ this particular characteristic to assess the “truths” of language. Incontestable as it is that no other discourse form is as…
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and State in Africa
Preface Introduction 1. Art War with the State: Writers and Guardians of a Postcolonial Society 2. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: The Conflict Between the Crafts of Art and the State 3. Enacting Power: The Politics of the Performance State 4. Voicing Silence: Language, Democracy, and a New World Order 5. Renaissance or Orature: Freeing Creativity from the Literary Colonisation of Orality Conclusion
Power Shift: America in the New Nigerian Imagination
In the last five years, novelists of Nigerian descent have been making attention gathering waves in Anglophone writing circles with prize winning stories driven by topics that do not quite fit the postcolonial problematic as it has been conceived in the past two decades. The dominant characters in these earnest novels suffer no debilitating psychological angst about the singular and unified nature of their being and destiny within a modern nation…
Postcolonial Critique in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther
The article addresses two aspects of postcolonial critique in Black Panther : first, its portrayal of the allure of grand statements in the cultivation of conspicuous and persistent self-regard in societies that wish to be recognizably independent, and second the centrality of repeatedly embodied material gestures and motions for the sustenance of enduring communal self-regard. These two prominent features of storytelling in the film, it will be …
Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther
This paper analyzes the impact of the determining circumstances of slavery and conversion to Christianity on how Philip Quaque, Phillis Wheatley, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther—missionaries and emancipated slaves from West Africa who wrote on their Atlantic experiences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—conceived Africa and Africans. It is proposed that the grand historiographic resistance/domination theme that is typically applied …
Decolonization without a linguistic turn is like drinking sugar without tea: Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì
This article interpretes highlights of the intellectual legacies of Ọlábíyìí Yáì (1939–2020), Beninois/Yorùbá, linguist and literary theorist, as revealing expressions of the autonomy strivings of the first generation of university based African scholars in the westernized academy. The “linguistic turn” group of scholars to which Yáì belonged pioneered a rigorous, systematic, ordinary language analysis of Afriphonic speech and cultural pragmatics…
Introduction: Abiola Irele, critical master, master critic
The following cluster of articles on the intellectual legacies of Professor Francis Abiola Irele (1936-2017) started as contributions to a memorial seminar during the 44th annual meeting and confer
If only journals could talk: Abiola Irele’s “contemplative vitalism”
This study locates and names as “contemplative vitalism” the nucleus of Abiola Irele's massive analyses of the complex trajectories of Africa-inflected 20th century intellectual history, particularly in literature and culture. The peculiar strain of the will to persist freely which the historical environment imposes on the African requires that the artist and thinker be bound involuntarily–vitally–to the surrounding that must be embraced critical…
Panegyric
Panegyric Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ (bio) In "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty" (1768), Phillis Wheatley commemorated George III thus after the repealing of the Stamp Act: Your subjects hope, dread Sire—The crown upon your brows may flourish long,And that your arm may in your God be strong!O may your sceptre num'rous nations sway,And all with love and readiness obey!1 No Nigerian literate in English language would miss the similarities between keyword…
Poetry, print, and the making of postcolonial literature
Christopher Okigbo is at the center of this book that binds, with more than the bare fact of English as the writers’ common literary language, J.P. Clark Bekederemo, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, D
Specterless Spirits/Spiritless Specters: Magical Realism's Two Faces
The paper proposes that the narrative functions of magical transformations and the characters' articulated beliefs in the ways of spirits and ghosts in Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World and Ben Okri's The Famished Road represent polar extremes in magical realist writing. In the former text, spirits serve as the main measure of responsibility and responsiveness, enabling social actors to plot the ordinarily unimaginable. Spectral bodies…
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
Differences in memoriam: De Man, Derrida, and literary semiology
Post‐structuralist thought queries the gesture by which linguistics‐based semiology equates elements of language with linguisticity itself. Instead of conceiving literature as a mere linguistic transformation whose lack of “worldly” contents marks it off as a “special” use of language, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida employ this particular characteristic to assess the “truths” of language. Incontestable as it is that no other discourse form is as…
Signatures of blood in William Wells Brown's Clotel
(1999). Signatures of blood in William Wells Brown's Clotel. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 115-134
Theory and Practice in African Orature
Micere Mugo's two most recent books bring together the diverse and criticism of African orature?the creative and imagi? native art of composition that relies on verbal art for communica? tion and that culminates in performance. Her theory book, African Orature and Human Rights, uses an aesthetic analysis of the narrative arts of the Ndia people of Kirinyaga District of Kenya to describe the relationship of arts and rights in an orate society. In …
Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and State in Africa
Preface Introduction 1. Art War with the State: Writers and Guardians of a Postcolonial Society 2. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: The Conflict Between the Crafts of Art and the State 3. Enacting Power: The Politics of the Performance State 4. Voicing Silence: Language, Democracy, and a New World Order 5. Renaissance or Orature: Freeing Creativity from the Literary Colonisation of Orality Conclusion
Oral Poetry and Hegemony: Yorùbá Oríkì
Kò Sóhun tí Mbe tí ò Nítàn (Nothing Is that Lacks a [Hi]story): On Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí’s
For questioning many governing axioms of African gender studies, Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí's The Invention of Women: Making an African sense of Western Gender Discourses often elicits strong reactions from its readers. The book asserts forcefully that scholars of gender in Africa, especially Yorùbá societies, fit their observed facts to learned western notions about women with little regard for the social history of their subjects of study. The book also …
Symptoms of the Present in Ato Quayson's Calibrations
Ato Quayson's Calibrations adds a crucial volume to the expanding library of Africa-inflected theoretical apprehensions of the present. Achille Mbembe's provocative ruminations on the macabre state of the African present, On the Postcolony, appeared 2001. Olakunle George's compelling work on the proper way to account for the modernity of the African postcolonial subject, Relocating Agency, appeared two years later. All these writers find contempo…
Specterless Spirits/Spiritless Specters: Magical Realism's Two Faces
The paper proposes that the narrative functions of magical transformations and the characters' articulated beliefs in the ways of spirits and ghosts in Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World and Ben Okri's The Famished Road represent polar extremes in magical realist writing. In the former text, spirits serve as the main measure of responsibility and responsiveness, enabling social actors to plot the ordinarily unimaginable. Spectral bodies…
Power Shift: America in the New Nigerian Imagination
In the last five years, novelists of Nigerian descent have been making attention gathering waves in Anglophone writing circles with prize winning stories driven by topics that do not quite fit the postcolonial problematic as it has been conceived in the past two decades. The dominant characters in these earnest novels suffer no debilitating psychological angst about the singular and unified nature of their being and destiny within a modern nation…
Writing Africa under the Shadow of Slavery: Quaque, Wheatley, and Crowther
This paper analyzes the impact of the determining circumstances of slavery and conversion to Christianity on how Philip Quaque, Phillis Wheatley, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther—missionaries and emancipated slaves from West Africa who wrote on their Atlantic experiences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—conceived Africa and Africans. It is proposed that the grand historiographic resistance/domination theme that is typically applied …
Okonkwo, Textual Closure, Colonial Conquest
The paper proposes an intertextual reading of narrative and performance closure in four Nigerian end-of-era stories about colonial conquest (Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God , Flora Nwapa’s Efuru , and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman ), focusing mainly on the meaning of the use of suicide, or the resolution of its threat, as a strategy ofending conflicts created directly by the enforcement of colonial rule or indire…
Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa
Book Review| March 01 2011 Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa La Vinia DeloisToni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 257 pp. $35.99. Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ Ohio State University Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is a professor in the departments of English and African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998)…
The Spell That Fails Lacks an Essential Term: Poetry, Animism, and Ideophones
Books: Review Forum
Jeyifo's turns of epigraphic traditions in “Talakawa Liberation Courier/Herald”
Biodun Jeyifo's newspaper column writing provokes a new understanding of leftist praxis in Nigeria in two ways: first, the frequent quotation of proverbs and apothegms brings an uncommon ideological perspective to African ordinary language analysis; second, the sayings are used in remarkably unprecedented manners to subtend the formulation of an activist ethics termed ìwàlẹ̀sìn (conducts of being manifest spirit)
Poetry, print, and the making of postcolonial literature
Christopher Okigbo is at the center of this book that binds, with more than the bare fact of English as the writers’ common literary language, J.P. Clark Bekederemo, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, D
If only journals could talk: Abiola Irele’s “contemplative vitalism”
This study locates and names as “contemplative vitalism” the nucleus of Abiola Irele's massive analyses of the complex trajectories of Africa-inflected 20th century intellectual history, particularly in literature and culture. The peculiar strain of the will to persist freely which the historical environment imposes on the African requires that the artist and thinker be bound involuntarily–vitally–to the surrounding that must be embraced critical…
Could anything under the sky be truly new
Panegyric
Panegyric Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ (bio) In "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty" (1768), Phillis Wheatley commemorated George III thus after the repealing of the Stamp Act: Your subjects hope, dread Sire—The crown upon your brows may flourish long,And that your arm may in your God be strong!O may your sceptre num'rous nations sway,And all with love and readiness obey!1 No Nigerian literate in English language would miss the similarities between keyword…
Introduction: Abiola Irele, critical master, master critic
The following cluster of articles on the intellectual legacies of Professor Francis Abiola Irele (1936-2017) started as contributions to a memorial seminar during the 44th annual meeting and confer
Postcolonial Critique in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther
The article addresses two aspects of postcolonial critique in Black Panther : first, its portrayal of the allure of grand statements in the cultivation of conspicuous and persistent self-regard in societies that wish to be recognizably independent, and second the centrality of repeatedly embodied material gestures and motions for the sustenance of enduring communal self-regard. These two prominent features of storytelling in the film, it will be …
Decolonization without a linguistic turn is like drinking sugar without tea: Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì
This article interpretes highlights of the intellectual legacies of Ọlábíyìí Yáì (1939–2020), Beninois/Yorùbá, linguist and literary theorist, as revealing expressions of the autonomy strivings of the first generation of university based African scholars in the westernized academy. The “linguistic turn” group of scholars to which Yáì belonged pioneered a rigorous, systematic, ordinary language analysis of Afriphonic speech and cultural pragmatics…
Institutions of African literature: Introduction
“Institutions of African Literature” was the theme of the 45th annual conference and meeting of the African Literature Association, held May 15–19, 2019, in Columbus, Ohio. Articles in this cluster
"Befitting Burial", or Conviviality in the Work of Mourning
Art (15 works) · Literature (13 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · History (10 works) · African history and culture studies (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · History (8 works) · Epistemology (6 works)