ktravula – a travelogue!

Call for Papers and Panels

Rethinking African Popular Culture and Performance: A Colloquium in Honour of Sola Olorunyomi at 50

In spotlighting the contributions of Sola Olorunyomi – author of the seminal Afrobeat!: Fela and the Imagined Continent and other influential texts – to literary and cultural studies, this colloquium intends to incite a debate around the ferment that Olorunyomi has generated as an idea, a scholar, a teacher within and outside the classroom, a performer, a social activist and a fifty-year-long insurrectionary event.

Popular culture and performance in Africa, more intently, are isolated as the hub around which the colloquium’s sub-themes will revolve. We also want to look, beyond the normative cultural forms, at para-artistic sites such as television reality, telephony, virtual interaction (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), open-market hawking, etc. The colloquium’s immediate objective is to update critical engagements with popular modes of culture, taking into consideration the recent emergence of new forms such as hip-hop, on the one hand, and the transformation of other forms such as home video culture as exemplified by Nollywood, on the other.

Scholars are free to account for the itineraries of borrowed forms and explore the implications of such practices on indigenous cultural modes in relation to the global political economy of culture, as well as the double layers of local and Western cultural hegemony. In this regard, highlighting the role of virtual communication and cyberculture as rallying points of counterhegemonic sentiments in the mass revolutions recently witnessed on the continent will be pertinent, given Olorunyomi’s credentials as a site of transformative action.

While presentations are not restricted to any themes or art forms, we expect participants to adequately problematize existing debates on key issues of the theory of African popular arts, the question of aesthetics, ideology, reception, as well as the place/role of technology and the media in the ongoing reconfiguration of the field. In their investigations, intending participants are encouraged to explore any national, regional or virtual community model relevant to the colloquium’s focus.

We therefore seek panel and individual presentations from scholars and practitioners that address issues relating, but not limited, to the following:

– Performance (Music, Drama, Disc Jockeying, etc.)
– Virtual Communication/ Cyberculture
– Reality Television
– Telephony
– Advertising
– Stand-up Comedy
– Slogans
– Home Video
– Football Fandom
– Body Art
– Fashion

Abstracts of not more that 250 words should be sent as email attachments to lorunyomiat50@yahoo.com.

The colloquium will hold at the University of Ibadan in late November, 2011. A festschrift of presented papers will be published afterwards. Deadline: Friday, September 30, 2011 (12 midnight, Nigerian time). We will respond to applicants regarding acceptance not later than Monday, October 3, 2011.

Direct all enquiries to lorunyomiat50@yahoo.com. Alternatively, contact Senayon Olaoluwa (PhD Wits), Department of Languages and Linguistics, Osun State University or Tunji Azeez (PhD Ibadan), Department of Theatre Arts and Music, Lagos State University.

Announcer: Olorunyomi@50 Carnival of Friends

Vernacular vs David Starkey. 1:0

This part of what British historian David Starkey said in a moment of careless rage at the weekend caught my eye immediately after he had initially said that a ‘violent, destructive and nihilistic’ black culture had corrupted too many of Britain’s youngsters:

‘A substantial section of the chavs have become black. The whites have become black. Black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together . . . which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.’ (Read more)

Some phrases immediately pop out here: “nihilistic black culture”, “this language… which is wholly false”, “Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England…” It would take a very long essay to respond to the slight of “nihilistic” being used to refer to a culture which the British empire spent much of the last hundred years stealing from in form of artifacts that now decorate the British Museum and private collections over the country. No, the part that interested me the most was a claim that the Jamaican patois (1.) is a false language and (2.) has been intruded (sic) in England (3.) is the cause of the violent culture among today’s youths black and white in England as well as a carrier of “black” culture. (Video here)

Coming from a layman, the false claim that any form of vernacular itself derived from English is so strange as to make an English speaking country seem like a foreign country seems silly enough, especially if that layman lives in a country that has some of the most unintelligible dialects of the same language in the world. But when a historian says it on national television to an audience already looking for a scapegoat in a national crises, then it takes on a totally different meaning more than just a rambling of the uninformed. What is more likely is that he was addressing his remarks not to the smart section of the populace but to the angry ones. I imagine a scenario in which any citizen of the United States would feel like s/he is living in a foreign country because all young people now speak in African-American Vernacular English as a result of a cultural movement. Highly unlikely. But that could be because the United States has evolved far ahead of Britain in its racial identity.

Yet, if that were the case, not only would it be an at least totally understandable social and cultural phenomenon, it would also be justifiable under one of the best known phonological facts: that language tend towards simplification. Most young people in America today have gone from using “You are” and “You’re” to using “Your” as a perfectly normal pronoun i.e. “Your the man of my dreams.” Other pronouns “he”, “she”, “it” have not yet undergone the same transformation. I have already started planning for a day when I would see the expression simply written as “Yor” while the rest catch up with the various forms of simplification: “Hez” “Shez” “Their” etc for “He is”, “She is” and “They are”. The ONLY thing it tells us is that humans like to make speaking easy and fun for themselves more importantly than anything else. It has nothing to do with skin colour, race or culture. Patois evolved howeve – just like other world creoles – as a pidgin made from an unusual contact of two strange languages. It is not by any chance an “easy” or “false” language. If its appeal has now spread to the level of popular acceptance within youths in a country far from its birthplace, it is more of a validation of its language status rather than its “falseness”. The English language as we know it today also evolved from the fusion of languages, dialects, and vernaculars from the old Germanic and Romance languages.

And we have not even talked about the (albeit annoying) false causality between speaking patois (or any vernacular for that matter), and gang violence. But then, David Starkey is not a linguist. He’s just a flawed historian, and more, even a poor speaker of English.

Reviewing “The Help”

A group of young southern housewives (all brought up by black maids working for meagre payment) gathered around to play bridge every week in each other’s house drinking wine and having fun. Beneath this facade is a series of complex relationships which included jealousy, in-fighting, pretense, hate, and compassion, courage, inferiority, humour, discrimination, ignorance, among very many others. The time was early to late 60s, and the place was Mississippi. The movie is an adaptation of “The Help” a best-selling novel written by 40 year old Kathryn Stockett.

I saw the movie today and it was a moving experience. (I have written a short review on Nigerianstalk.org.) My attention was first called to the movie in May at a house party at a professor’s house. She’s a 70 year old history professor here who occupies a vivid memory span of some of the event recalled in the book. I recommend the movie to everyone who is interested in a few more nuances of the race relations in the South of the 60s and their implications for today’s society. It is an important story.

Reading in Lagos

Join the Jalaa Writers Collective this weekend for a day of reading by some of Nigeria’s most promising writers. Join them as they address questions about publishing in Nigeria and what a Writers’ Collective may offer, what Jalaa Writers Collective offers. The event is FREE!

Date: August 13, 2011

Venue: Freedom Park, Broad Street, Opposite. General Hospital. Lagos.

Readings by:

A. Igoni Barrett, one-time editor of Farafina Magazine is the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His first book, the story collection “From Caves of Rotten Teeth”, was published in 2005 in Nigeria. His second story collection is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2013.

Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo is a lecturer, writer, novelist, critic, essayist, journalist, and administrator. She has written over twenty books. Her latest work “Roses and Bullets”, published by Jalaa Writers’ Collective is about the Nigerian Civil War. The former winner of the NLNG Prize for Literature, the biggest prize for literature in Nigeria, heads the Prize’s panel of judges this year.

Jude Dibia is the author of “Walking With Shadows”,” Unbridled” (winner of the 2007 NDDC/ANA sponsored Ken Saro-Wiwa Prize for Prose and finalist in the 2007 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature) and the newest, “Blackbird”.

Odili Ujubuonu is the award winning author of Pregnancy of the Gods (Winner, 2006 ANA/Jacaranda Prize for Prose), Treasure in the Winds (winner, 2008 ANA/Chevron Prize on Environmental Issues) and the newest, “Pride of the Spider Clan.”

Uche Peter Umez is one of the 24 winners of the 2006 and 2008 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. No, he is not the actor. He is the winner of the 2006 ANA/Funtime Prize for Children Literature for his unpublished novel,” Sam and the Wallet, and 2008 ANA/Funtime Prize for Children Literature . He is the author of Dark through the Delta (poems), Tears in Her Eyes” (short stories) and “Aridity of Feelings” (poems). His latest work “The Runaway Hero” is on the NLNG Prize shortlist for 2011.

More information on Facebook.

Re: Spotting Nigerians

I got this mail from Nick about another personal peculiarity in English pronunciation in response to my recent post. Enjoy.

_______________________

I enjoyed your post about spotting Nigerian accents by the pronunciation of “man/men”

(https://www.ktravula.com/2011/08/spotting-nigerians/).

This doesn’t have anything to do with Nigerian English, but I know you like American English accents, so I thought I’d write. I ran into something similar to the “man/men” issue when I moved from my home town of Portland, Oregon to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (you should visit both cities if you get a chance). Having lived in Pittsburgh for ten
years I still find myself having to consciously use more of a “aa” sound, particularly with the word “bag”, which my wife tells me I pronounce too much like “beg”. I do it pretty automatically now, but I actually find myself exaggerating it to prevent comments. I think I sound like a sheep, going “baaaaaa-g”. The vowel sounds more open and I hold my tongue farther back in my throat than I would naturally.

This might not be exactly the same as the “men/man” thing, but it seems similar.

This is just my experience and not evidence of a regional accent issue, but at least one of my friends reported something similar after moving from Portland to the east coast. Other significant factors are that I may have picked up a bit of my mom’s New England accent, and also that Pittsburgh is home to a slight local accent and some cool local vocabulary like “yinz” instead of “y’all”.

Thanks for your always-interesting blog,

Sincerely,

Nick.

_____________________

Notes

This mail reminds me of one other distinct pronunciation difference in Nigerian and Ghanaian English. Growing up in the early to late eighties, I remember a common assumption that Ghanaian English sounded closer to the British standard than Nigerian English, and Nigerian parents paid more to send their children to private schools that had Ghanaian teachers rather than ones that didn’t. And though they paid so much for the “privilege” for us, we never understood much of the obsession beyond the fact that our teachers insisted on pronouncing “Church” as “cherch” (as it rhymes with “perch”), the as “the” (as rhyming with the “e” in “wet”, hamburger as “hamberger”, luck as “lack”, and but as “bat” rather than the Nigerian “bot” among very many others that I can list if I get the time. We students also didn’t gain much from the hubris that the teacher brought with them either. It however provided plenty moments of comic relief in classroom sessions when it didn’t come along with punishments for deviation. We had some good laughs as I am sure did Ghanaians who had listen to us speak English as well. I have been to East African and I think that the English there – along with its own amusing peculiarities that knocked Nigerian and Ghanaian versions to a corner – comes the closest to British English pronunciation standard in all of the Englishes I’ve heard on the continent. But then, I’ve never been everywhere.

Thank you Nick.