Day: July 10, 2013

By Professor Pius Adesanmi

Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing

Author of  You’re Not a Country, Africa!

 Keynote lecture delivered at the National Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors

Uyo, Akwa Ibom State

November 9, 2012

Protocols!

When I first received the theme of this conference in a somber email from the soon-to-be-Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, I wondered what writerly demons took possession of my great friend, Professor Remi Raji, Richard Ali, Denja Abdulahi, D.M. Dzukogi, and other members of the National Executive of the Association of Nigerian Authors, and made them settle on a theme advertising such apparently incompatible terms as literature and security in the same sentence. Being a very active member of literary Cyberia (my neologistic contraction of Cyber and Nigeria), I could understand and relate to the social media part of the theme but security? National security? Was it the demons…

By Professor Pius Adesanmi

Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing

Author of  You’re Not a Country, Africa!

(Remarks at the Anglophone-Francophone Cultural Conversations Panel Convened by the African Studies Program and the Department of Comparative Literature, Penn State University, February 27, 2013)

First things first. I want to thank the usual suspects for inviting me back home to give a talk. For those of you who are new members of the Penn State community in this audience, I use the word home because this is where it all began – I mean my career – amidst wonderful colleagues and under the exceptional mentorship of Professor Carey Eckhardt, my Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature, and Professor Thomas Hale who, at the time, was Chair of the French Department. Since I left to join other wonderful colleagues in another wonderful Department at Carleton University in Canada, every return to…