Title: Who owns the problem? : Africa and the struggle for agency /
Authors: Adesanmi, Pius; Falola, Toyin; Harrow, Kenneth W.,
Year: 2020
Subjects: Literature and society Africa.; Literature and society Nigeria.; Intellectual life; Literature and society; Social conditions.; Africa Social conditions; Nigeria Social conditions; Africa Intellectual life; Nigeria Intellectual life; Africa; Nigeria.
Abstract: "This book assembles lectures given by Pius Adesanmi that answer the questions: 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? His lecture delivery techniques combine with diction and borrowings from Nigerian popular culture to create a distinct African performative mode that ultimately becomes a form of resistance against Western ideals of knowledge transfer. Together, these short essays preserve the voice of an African writer lost too soon. Adesanmi urges his readers to commit themselves to Africa's cultural agency"--
Contents: Foreword: More Than Just a Name / by Toyin Falola -- Foreword / by Kenneth W. Harrow -- Preface. Form as Resistance: The Story of This Book -- #WhoOwnsTheProblem? -- Culture, Development, and Other Annoyances -- For Whom Is Africa Rising? -- Africa Is People, Nigeria Is Nigerians: Provocations on Post-mendicant Economies -- The Disappeared African Roots of Emma Watson's UN Feminism -- The Africa Just Outside of Your Hilton Hotel Window -- Capitalism and Memory: Of Golf Courses and Massage Parlors in Badagry, Nigeria -- Ode to the Bottle-For Ken Harrow who Laughed -- Aso Ebi on my Mind -- Ara Eko, Ara Oke: Lagos, Culture, and the Rest of Us -- A Race through Race in Missouri -- Dowry: Managing Africa's Many Lovers -- Caribbean Self, African Selfie -- Face Me, I Book You: Writing Africa's Agency in the Age of the Netizen -- What Does (Nigerian) Literature Secure? -- Post-centenary Nigeria: New Literatures, New Leaders, New Nation