A new African podcast titled The New African Diasporas just launched and it looks incredible! It is hosted by Nigerian academic Sakiru Adebayo.
Launched in January 2024, the podcast is a way of exploring the lives and experiences of Africans on the move in the twenty-first century through the podcast medium. The first season includes interviews with the so-called “new African diaspora writers”.
Adebayo remarks that he hopes all enthusiasts/students/scholars of African Literature, as well as members of the new African diaspora, will listen to the podcast. He adds, “The audience will have the opportunity to hear directly from their favorite contemporary African writers and, overall, the podcast will contribute to a greater appreciation of these writers’ works.”
Sakiru Adebayo is an assistant professor of African Literature in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He is the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa (2023) and the winner of the 2022 Nigerian Prize for Literary Criticism as well as the 2023 Amilcar Cabral Prize. He recently published an essay on Literary Hub titled “The Diasporization of African Literature”.
New episodes of The New African Diasporas Podcast drop on the first of every month. It is available at most podcast platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Check out the highlights from some of the episodes below:
Episode 1 – Taiye Selasi, “The Model Minority Trap”
In the first episode, Adebayo sits down with the acclaimed author, Taiye Selasi, to talk about her works on the new African diasporas. The talk touches on her canonical novel, Ghana Must Go, her concept of Afropolitanism, and the need for African immigrants to not fall for the model minority narrative, especially in the United States.
Episode 2 – Tope Folarin, “Black Becomings”
In the second episode, Adebayo engages in a conversation with the Nigerian-American writer, Tope Folarin. The conversation centers around Folarin’s novel A Particular Kind of Black Man but also extends to broader issues such as memory and migration, migration and mental illness, and the heterogeneity of blackness in the United States.
Episode 3 – Helon Habila, “The Morality of Not Feeling at Home in One’s Home”
In the third episode, Adebayo engages in a conversation with Helon Habila on his latest novel, Travellers. The conversation begins with the novel’s epigraph, a quote from Theodore Adorno, which states that “it is part of morality to not to be at home in one’s home”. The conversation also touches on issues such as the ethics of exile, the encounters between the Afropolitan and the Afro-refugee in the Global North, the frictions between immigrant roots and rootlessness, the push and pull factors of postcolonial African migrations, and the not-so-simple dynamics of return.
New episodes are released on the first of every month. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don’t miss out!
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