Work Deepens Understanding Of His Literature

To celebrate the 60th birthday of Director and Associate Professor, Institute of African Studies, and an affiliate faculty member, Department of English, School of Journalism and Communication, at Ottawa’s Carleton University, Dr Tony Nduka Otiono, 19 scholars and literary enthusiasts from across the globe carried out an incisive and comprehensive study of his works and career in a new work titled, Critical Perspectives on Nduka Otiono.

This publication, with its interdisciplinary approach and impactful essays, is considered an outstanding contribution to the oeuvre of one of the most important Nigerian-Canadian intellectuals. The essays offer a comprehensive examination of the works of the writer, academic and journalist for his contribution to African cultural studies, postcolonial literature, and media practice. Otiono’s research interests include, Cultural Studies, Oral Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Media and Communication Studies, Globalisation and Popular Culture.

Born April 8, 1964, in Kano, Otiono, who hails from Ogwashi-Uku, Delta State, earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Alberta, Canada. He also has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English and an MA in English from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria in 1987 and 1990.

The book, which was unveiled in April to commemorate his birthday, features blurbs from renowned academics, writers, and media icons, praising his work for its scholarship on ‘Street Stories’, fiction, and poetry that imagine postcolonial futures, as well as a memoir-poetics that creates experimental accounts of migration flows and the experience of displacement.

Otiono says ‘Street Stories’ is a scholarly examination of a genre of oral narratives in Nigeria. These stories, which often, are dismissed as rumours, gossip and myths, are powerful tools of political resistance and cultural expression.

He believes students, scholars, literary critics, writers, and general readers interested in postcolonial literature, performance studies, cultural studies, critical theory, literary history, media studies and popular culture will find the book intriguing.

Provost and Vice President Academic at Carleton University, Dr. Pauline Rankin, in conversation with Otiono, eulogises his creativity, productivity, and academic accomplishments over the past years as a source of pride for the academic community at Carleton, while looking forward to more of his academic exploits in the literary space.

“The book’s unveiling marked a historic day,” explains the Interim Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Carleton University, Dr. Anne Bowker.

The applause that followed the book’s unveiling was not just for Otiono or the books, “but also for the future they represented.” This was a future where the arts and social sciences would continue to evolve and profoundly impact the world, said Bowker.

Bowker reveal Otiono has a distinguished record of interdisciplinary research that spans cultural studies, oral performance and literature in Africa, postcolonial studies, media and communication studies, globalisation, and popular culture.

The book reviewer, Dr. Isaac Asume Osuoka, coordinator of Social Action International, described the book as providing a deep knowledge of Otiono’s extensive work and contextualizing his intellectual, political, academic, and rich cultural values.

Osuaka adds that Otiono’s passion for the “Street Stories,” the narratives that emerged from the daily interactions and experiences of the common people, led him to believe that these stories held the key to understanding the postcolonial condition, the ongoing struggle of a nation finding its identity amid the remnants of colonial rule.

Edited by Chris Dunton, Mathias Iroro Orhero and Ndubuisi Mathias Aniemeka, the book marks a milestone in the study of African literature and its diaspora.

Dunton, known for his scholarly work on Nigerian drama and literature, including authoring the seminal study, titled, Make Man Talk True: Nigerian Drama in English since the 1970s and Nigerian Theatre in English: A Critical Bibliography, is a retired Professor of Literature in English and former Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities at the National University of Lesotho.

Aniemeka is a candidate in the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, at Charles University, Prague. As an emerging scholar in Anglophone Literature with a bias for poetry and poetics, medical humanities, literary theory and criticism, autobiographical studies, and creative writing, Aniemeka’s articles and reviews have appeared in referred journals and literary magazines. His doctoral thesis revolves around the ‘Signifying Chameleon’, the theory he is developing for Anglophone poetry. Ndubuisi Martins (pen name) has published two collections of poems –One Call, Many Answers (2017) and Answers through the Bramble (2021), which was longlisted for the 2022 Pan African Writers Association Poetry Prize (English Category).

While Orhero is a doctoral researcher at McGill University, as well as the Teaching Faculty at Concordia University.

According to Professor of English and author of Battles of Songs: Udje Tradition of the Urhobo, G.G. Darah, “this anthology of essays is an incisive and comprehensive study of the works and dynamic career of Nduka Otiono…His protean creative output and academic engagements are interrogated by experts from diverse disciplinary perspectives: he is a poet, storyteller, griot, journalist, editor, performer, literary analyst, teacher, theorist, and administrator of strategic cultural institutions in Nigeria and Canada. Otiono’s multi-bunched activism exemplifies the experience of scholar-artists in Nigeria at the threshold of the new millennium when the humanising power of the creative arts, stories, journalism and the mass media helped Nigeria to overcome the terror of despotic military rulers…This book will consolidate his stellar standing among his peers.”

For Okey Ndibe, novelist, essayist, and author of Foreign Gods Inc. and Never Look an American in the Eye, “I have long admired Nduka Otiono for the breadth of his professional interests, his vast and varied creative projects, and the impressive range of his academic explorations. This capacious book pays due homage to the man’s outstanding work as a cultural entrepreneur, his vitality as a poet and fictionist, and the interdisciplinary impetus of his scholarship.”

Dapo Olorunyomi, Publisher, Premium Times, Nigeria, says,“In this seminal work, the editors deserve full credit for excellently locating Nduka Otiono, the famed cultural activist and intellectual, at the nexus of Nigeria’s sociopolitical currents, and succeed in offering a competent aesthetics and historical account of one of Africa’s truly accomplished writers, literary scholars, and journalists.”

Also, Olu Obafemi, retired Professor of English and Dramatic Literature and former President, Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) and the Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL), the book is “a fresh and unique compendium of engaging scholarship that delights as it informs.”
Otiono was a journalist at the early part of his career. He worked in print media, with a focus on literary and cultural journalism, and earned expertise at the editing and management levels.

During his 15 years journalistic career, he was the National Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors (2001–2005), the founding editor of The Post Express Literary Supplement (PELS), which won Literary Column of the Year 1997 and the first ANA Merit Award in 1998.

The Night Hides with a Knife (short stories), which won the ANA/Spectrum Prize, Voices in the Rainbow (poems), which was a finalist for the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize, and Love in a Time of Nightmares (poems), for which he received the James Patrick Folinsbee Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing, are just a few of the works he has published. He made the transition to academia in 2004 and started working as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Ibadan’s Department of English.

In 2006, he won FS Chia Doctoral Scholarship at University of Alberta. One year later, he was nominated for Trudeau Scholarship and in 2008, he was awarded Professional Development Research Grant. In the same year, he was awarded Andrew Stewart Memorial Graduate Prize for Research by the same institution.

In 2009, he won Sarah Nettie Christie Research Award, William Rea Scholarship, Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Scholarship, Gordin Kaplan Graduate Student Award. In 2010, he won James Patrick Folinsbee Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing, in 2011, he was nominee for the Governor General’s gold medal. That same year, he held a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, where he was also appointed Visiting Assistant Professor.

In 2014, he became an assistant professor at Carleton’s Institute of African Studies, Ottawa, Canada. In 2020, he was promoted to associate professor at Carleton’s Institute of African Studies.

In 2015 and 2016, he received the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship and in the latter year he won Capital Educators’ award for excellence in teaching. In 2017, he won Carleton University Faculty of Arts and Social Science Early Career Research Excellence Award and in 2018, he was given the Black History Ottawa Community Builder Award.
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In 2022, he became the Director, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, and was also appointed a Faculty Advisor for Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion by the university authority in the same year.

In 2022, he made it to the final list of Archibald Lampman Prize for poetry for his anthology DisPlace and in 2023, he was one of the winners of FASS Research Excellence Awards.