African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba

(Hardback)

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This book is a significant and original contribution to the ongoing conversation on modernity. It uses the creative and critical works of Nigerian playwright and novelist Femi Euba to demonstrate the place and function of African cultures in modernity and makes the case for the vibrancy of such cultures in the shaping and constitution of the modern world. In addition to a critique of Eubas fifty-year artistic career, this book offers an account of Eubas formative relationship with the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Wole Soyinka, during the promising days of the Nigerian theatre in the immediate post-independence period, and the effect of this relationship on Eubas artistic choices and reflections. Euba contributes to our understanding of Africas negotiation of modernity in significant ways, especially in his sensitive reading of Esu, the Yoruba god of fate and chance, as an artistic consciousness whose historical and ideological mobility during New World slavery, during Africas colonial period, and in the manifestations in the black diaspora today emblematizes the process we call modernity. By using ritual, myth, and satire as avenues to the debate on modernity, Euba lays emphasis on the transformative possibilities at the crossroads of history. His works engage the psychological interconnections between old gods and new worlds and the dialogic relationship between tradition and modernity. Delineating the philosophical and literary debates that reject an easy division between a stereotypically traditional Africa and a modern West, the author shows how Eubas plays and novel engage the entwined and intimate relationships between the modern and the traditional in contemporary Africa, and thereby she asserts the global resonance of Eubas African, and specifically Yoruba, conception of the world. By meticulously collecting, cataloguing, and critiquing Eubas works, Osagie models a new way of practicing African literary studies and invites us to glimpse narrative genius on the continent that she firmly believes African scholars should both promote and celebrate.

Reviews

Few have meant more to the flowering of African and African American theater over the past half-century than the Nigerian actor, playwright, director, and scholar, Femi Euba. Now, thanks to Iyunolu Osagies brilliant study, we at last have an interpretive companion to Eubas life and work that will make it possible not only to teach him within the context of his times, but to gain a deeper appreciation for what his art has revealed about the crossroads of tradition and modernity and the possibilities that exist for a dynamic past within a diasporic world. I have known Femi Euba since my days as a graduate student in Cambridge under the tutelage of our mentor Wole Soyinka, and I could not be more thrilled that his geniusfor signification, satire, and so much moreis finally receiving the serious treatment it deserves. -- Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University
African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba by Iyunolu Osagie deftly navigates the intellectual and cultural terrains that create the context for Femi Eubas work. Her brilliant assessment of Eubas formative role as a pioneer of Black Atlantic drama and criticism deepens our knowledge of the transnational ritual, social, and artistic entanglements situated in the African diaspora. The study also significantly adds to the body of work on the trickster deity Esu in its innovative, satiric, and wise analysis of this figure as a guide and muse. -- Solimar Otero, Louisiana State University

Author Bio

Iyunolu Osagie teaches English and African studies at Pennsylvania State University.