Tejumola Olaniyan Memorial lecture holds April 23

The UW-Madison Department of English and the Centre for the Humanities is honoured to present the first yearly Tejumola Olaniyan Memorial Lecture with Moradewun Adejunmobi, professor and former chair in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis.

Scheduled to hold on Friday, April 23, 2021, the lecture comes up at 12:00pm. Titled, Second Acts: Theatricality, State and Popular Culture in an African Setting, this presentation tracks the changing dispositions for theatricality in contemporary Nigerian political and popular culture. It ponders the persistence of theatricality as a dimension of Nigerian and African civic culture under varied political dispensations.

It also considers the extent to which new media technologies have or have not fundamentally altered the functions of theatricality in the African world. An examination of the interface between media and theatricality in Nigerian popular culture serves as the point of departure for a reflection on the nature of theatricality in 21st century Nigeria, as well as the import and potential outcomes of current forms of theatricality for political and civic culture in the present age.

In a career that spanned over three decades, Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan pursued a unique, capacious, and generous vision of humanistic scholarship in the field of African literary and cultural studies, including the Black world as a whole and extending beyond it.