Olakunle George 

Internationalism and Literary Africa 

My presentation will discuss examples of intertextual conversations and cross-pollination of ideas between anglophone Black African and Black Diasporic intellectuals. The vectors of influence and dialogue have gone in both directions, traversing the continent and the diaspora: for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong’o in relation to the influence of George Lamming and Caribbean literature, or Derek Walcott in conversation with Wole Soyinka’s The Road. I will focus on the immediate post-Independence era in Africa, that is, the 1960s and 1970s. I will also discuss a number of other artists: the South African/Botswanan novelist Bessie Head, the Nigerian theater practitioner Duro Ladipo, and the Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek. I am interested in examining the diverse ways in which these writers and artists explored the challenge of decolonization and the vision of forging transnational intellectual community through cultural work. 

Biography 

Olakunle George is Professor of English and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. George studied at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and Cornell University, Ithaca NY. His primary academic interests are in African literary and cultural criticism, Black Internationalism during the mid-20th Century decolonization era, and Anglophone postcolonial studies. From 2012-17, George was on the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Forum on 20th and 21st Century Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, serving as chair in 2015-16. He also served on the Executive Committee of the MLA Forum on African Literatures from 1999-2004 (chair in 2002-03). He is author of African Literature and Social Change: Tribe, Nation, Race (2017), and Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (2003), winner of a “CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title” award. He edited A Companion to African Literatures(2021), and co-edited (with Susan Hegeman, Efraín Kristal, and Peter M. Logan), Wiley-Blackwell’s The Encyclopedia of the Novel (2011). His publications have also appeared in such journals as Comparative Literature, Diacritics, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Research in African Literatures.