The latest issue of the Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA), edited by Moradewun Adejunmobi and Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, celebrates the scholarly contributions of the late Prof. Tejumola Olaniyan. Sub-titled “Critical Legacies,” this special issue serves as the inaugural edition of the series, previously known as “Critical Masters.” The issue is currently available for free for a limited time.

Olaniyan, a renowned professor of English and African literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, passed on in 2019. A brilliant scholar and prominent figure in the field of African Cultural Studies, he also served as JALA‘s editor-in-chief the year of his passing. It is fitting that the inaugural issue of this new series, initially titled “Critical Masters” by Olaniyan, is dedicated to honoring his legacy.

The editors note that the shift in title reflects a reckoning with the gendered and historical associations of the title “master” and simultaneously emphasizes Olaniyan’s vision that the journal should not be “simply celebrating notable scholars in African literary and cultural studies” but rather present “an opportunity to critique and extend the criticism carried out by scholars in African literary and cultural studies… in a bid to keep the history of critical interventions in our field alive.”

To borrow a question from the title of one of his books, Olaniyan was asking through the series: what would it mean to take African literary and cultural studies seriously? In describing the series as aspiring towards metacriticism, Olaniyan sought to nudge scholars in African literary and cultural studies away from a number of problematic inclinations that in his view undermined and complicated robust growth for the field…We would like to think that Olaniyan himself would have adjudged this interweaving of the writing of one scholar in African literary and cultural studies with that of other scholars and theorists as exemplary of the kind metacriticism that he had in mind when he designed the Critical Masters series.

This special issue aims to both celebrate and critically examine Olaniyan’s work, extending his insights into new areas of inquiry. Olaniyan was a truly interdisciplinary scholar, as reflected by the diversity of topics that encompass this special issue, spanning political cartoons, performance studies, postcolonial dramaturgy, disability studies, global Black cultural production, and queer studies.

The eight primary essays and the four shorter essays in the “Notes from the Field” section of this issue together provide a critical analysis of key concepts from Olaniyan’s work and offer a method for metacritical inquiry in African literary and cultural studies.

See a full table of contents below.

Critical Legacies: Tejumola Olaniyan

Introduction

Olaniyan’s legacy: metacriticism in African literary and cultural studies by Moradewun Adejunmobi & Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi

RESEARCH ARTICLES

“Canvassing the Generative: Fela and Olaniyan’s Cultural Analysis of the African State” by Wale Adebanwi

“On interregna: Tejumola Olaniyan and the Radical Normality of Theory” by Matthew H. Brown

“Wahala dey like wetin?: Theorizing Crisis in Nigerian Cultural Forms” by Utitofon Ebong Inyang

“Incredible, Libidinal, Strange: African Queer Studies and Tejumola Olaniyan’s Legacies” by Brenna M. Munro

“Common Sense, Uncommon Sense: Tejumola Olaniyan in the Theorization of African Postcolonial Drama” by Wumi Raji

“The Theater of Tejumola Olaniyan: African Performance and the Possibilities of Strangeness” by Laura Edmondson

“‘Arrest the dance!’: Rethinking Tejumola Olaniyan’s “Postcolonial Antinomy” and the Politics of Art Activism” by Ying Cheng

“Of Gaps and Scars: a Voyage in Tejumola Olaniyan’s Performance Theories and the Throes of Postcoloniality” by Omotayo Oloruntoba-Oju

“Tejumola Olaniyan: a Bibliography” by Moradewun Adejunmobi

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: OLANIYAN’S INSIGHTS IN CONTRIBUTIONS TO URBAN, VISUAL, AND DISABILITY STUDIES

“On Chaos, Order, and Urban Improvisations: Narrativizing Postcolonial African Urbanity” by Tolulope Akinwole

“Pixelated Panegyrics: Notes on Album Arts and Authenticity in Fuji and Afrobeats” by Michael Oshindoro

“Notes on Disability as Cultural Biography of the Postcolonial African State” by Theophilus Okunlola

“Cartooning in Nigeria: Revisiting the Paradigmatic Tradition” by Ganiyu Jimoh

The full issue is freely available online for a limited time here.