Oral Literary Performance in Africa: Beyond Text edited by Nduka Otiono and Chiji Akọma in honour of Professor Isidore Okpewho is now available for pre-order.
According to a Facebook post by Otiono, the book, to be published by Routledge on June 18, 2021, will also ship on the same date.
“This book delivers an admirably comprehensive and rigorous analysis of African oral literatures and performance,” said a post on routledge.com.
Gathering insights from distinguished scholars in the field, the post continues, the book provides a range of contemporary interdisciplinary perspectives in the study of oral literature and its transformations in everyday life, fiction, poetry, popular culture, and postcolonial politics.
“Topics discussed include folklore and folklife; oral performance and masculinities; intermediated orality, modern transformations, and globalization; orality and mass media; spoken word and imaginative writing. The book also addresses research methodologies and the thematic and theoretical trajectories of scholars of African oral literatures, looking back to the trailblasing legacies of Ruth Finnegan, Harold Scheub, and Isidore Okpewho”.
Hein Willemse, Ernst R. Wendland, Chris Dunton, Harold Scheub, Aaron Rosenberg, Obiwu, Femi Euba and Daniela Merolla are among the contributors to the book. Others are Uta Reuster-Jahn, Rosaleen O. B. Nhlekisana and Raphael d’Abdon as well as the two editors, who equally pen the book’s introduction.
Otiono is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Supervisor at the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University. He is the author and co-editor of eight books of creative writing and academic research including Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, Performance, Literature (2019) and Wreaths for a Wayfarer (2020).
Akọma is Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Literatures with joint appointments in the Department of English and the Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. He is the author Folklore in New World Black Fiction: Writing and the Oral Traditional Aesthetics.