Who Owns the Problem?: Africa and the Struggle for Agency

by Pius Adesanmi

Overview

How may we conceptualize Africa in the driver’s seat of her own destiny in the twenty-first century? How practically may her cultures become the foundation and driving force of her innovation, development, and growth in the age of the global knowledge economy? How may the Africanist disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences be revamped to rise up to these challenges through new imaginaries of intersectional reflection? This book assembles lectures given by Pius Adesanmi that address these questions. Adesanmi sought to create an African world of signification in which verbal artistry interpellates performer and audience in a heuristic process of knowledge production. The narrative and delivery of his arguments, the antiphonal call and response, and the aspects of Yoruba oratory and verbal resources all combine with diction and borrowings from Nigerian popular culture to create a distinct African performative mode. This mode becomes a form of resistance, specifically against the pressure to conform to Western ideals of the packaging, standardization, and delivery of knowledge. Together, these short essays preserve the
committed and passionate voice of an African writer lost far too soon. Adesanmi urges his readers to commit themselves to Africa’s cultural agency.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611863550
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2020
Series:	African Humanities and the Arts
Edition description:	1
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

PIUS ADESANMI (1972-2019) was a scholar, writer, literary critic, satirist, and columnist.

Table of Contents

More than Just a Name Toyin Falola vii

Foreword Kenneth W. Harrow xiii

Preface. Form as Resistance: The Story of This Book xxi

Part 1 Crossfire

#WhoOwnsTheProblem? 3

Culture, Development, and Other Annoyances 15

For Whom Is Africa Rising? 27

Africa Is People, Nigeria Is Nigerians: Provocations on Post-mendicant Economies 41

The Disappeared African Roots of Emma Watson's UN Feminism 47

The Africa Just Outside of Your Hilton Hotel Window 53

Part 2 Imagining Culture, Figuring Change

Capitalism and Memory: Of Golf Courses and Massage Parlors in Badagry, Nigeria 61

Ode to the Bottle-For Ken Harrow, Who Laughed 71

Aso Ebi on My Mind 77

Ara Eko, Ara Oke: Lagos, Culture, and the Rest of Us 87

A Race through Race in Missouri 95

Part 3 Variations on Love and Self

Dowry: Managing Africa's Many Lovers 101

Caribbean Self, African Seine 115

Face Me, I Book You: Writing Africa's Agency in the Age of the Netizen 127

What Does (Nigerian) Literature Secure? 137

Post-centenary Nigeria: New Literatures, New Leaders, New Nation 153

Bibliography 165

Index 173

Editorial Reviews

Before his untimely death, Pius Adesanmi had emerged as one of Africa’s leading public intellectuals and as an astute interpreter of the African imagination. In this collection he speaks to us from the land of the ancestors with a voice that is both cautionary and prophetic, providing one of the best diagnoses of the African problematic that I have read in many years. Combining sharp analysis with humor, this book is an invitation to all of us to rededicate our commitment to Africa’s continuing struggle for agency in the twenty-first century.

Simon Gikandi

Long after you have read them, the insights of these essays stay with you, almost in the same manner in which the memory of his life and work, now that he
is gone, remain indelible. No other person writes of Africa in the world and the world in Africa like Pius Adesanmi. Consistently passionate, witty, humorous,
and yet rigorously researched and thought through, the essays collected in this book are sure to create a new benchmark for activist intellectualism in public
discourse in the social media.”
—BIODUN JEYIFO, former Professor in African and African American Studies and Comparative Literature, Harvard University

From the Publisher

Long after you have read them, the insights of these essays stay with you, almost in the same manner in which the memory of his life and work, now that he is gone, remain indelible. No other person writes of Africa in the world and the world in Africa like Pius Adesanmi. Consistently passionate, witty, humorous, and yet rigorously researched and thought through, the essays collected in this book are sure to create a new benchmark for activist intellectualism in public discourse in the social media.

Biodun Jeyifo