Pleasure in language arises from the creativity of everyday life. Africa’s historical and ethnogr... more Pleasure in language arises from the creativity of everyday life. Africa’s historical and ethnographic record is full of striking examples of linguistic play. Three scenes of Yorùbá linguistic creativity illustrate this: praise poetry in a small town, a traveling popular theater, and early Yorùbá newspapers. Each yields distinctive pleasures, but central to all of these is the act of mutual recognition of forms of words and attunement to the linguistic production of others. Barber suggests that verbal arts bring to consciousness the fundamental processes by which sociality is constituted and may thus provide a potential starting point for social theory from “within.”
... Yoruba language and literature. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Afolayan, Adebisi. PUBL... more ... Yoruba language and literature. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Afolayan, Adebisi. PUBLISHER: University Press (Ibadan, Nigeria and Ife). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1982. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 978154273X [pbk]). VOLUME/EDITION: ...
An archive of ephemera seems almost a contradiction in terms. If archives come into being because... more An archive of ephemera seems almost a contradiction in terms. If archives come into being because governments and individuals preserve papers they consider to be worth keeping, then an archive should be a crystallisation of past and present values concerning texts. Most of Nigeria's archives are in fact that kind of crystallisation, whether they are local government records, newspaper collections, Arabic-language chronicles, or little-known collections of personal letters and diaries, preserved because the individuals concerned, and subsequently their heirs, had a sense of their value.
Ifá is a divination system practised by highly trained specialists in the Yorùbá-speaking areas o... more Ifá is a divination system practised by highly trained specialists in the Yorùbá-speaking areas of West Africa. The geomantic system of sixteen signs from which a total of 256 figures are derived is widespread and is believed to have originated in Arabic Muslim cultures. But the remarkable corpus of poetry attached to the geomantic system is peculiar to Yorùbá culture. During a divination session the diviner manipulates his instruments to yield one or more figures, and then recites and interprets one or more of the large body of verses attached to that figure. The extent of the total corpus is unknown, but it is certain that it runs to thousands of verses. All the verses share the same basic structure. Each narrates an antecedent divination session performed by a legendary or primordial diviner for a client whose subsequent fortunes are then narrated. The rigid structure of each verse and of the system as a whole does not prevent adaptation and incorporation of new elements. This co...
The ‘postcolonial’ criticism of the 1980s and 1990s — which both continues and inverts the ‘Commo... more The ‘postcolonial’ criticism of the 1980s and 1990s — which both continues and inverts the ‘Commonwealth’ criticism inaugurated in the 1960s — has promoted a binarized, generalized model of the world which has had the effect of eliminating African-language expression from view. This model has produced an impoverished and distorted picture of ‘the colonial experience’ and the place of language in that experience. It has maintained a centre-periphery polarity which both exaggerates and simplifies the effects of the colonial imposition of European languages. It turns the colonizing countries into unchanging monoliths, and the colonized subject into a homogenized token: ‘that most tedious, generic hold-all, “the postcolonial Other” ’, as McClintock puts it — an Other whose experience is determined so overwhelmingly by his or her relation to the metropolitan centre that class, gender and other local historical and social pressures are elided.1 Despite intermittent claims to specificity, ...
CONTENTS Editors' Introduction ... vii Acknowledgements ... xi List of Illustrations ... xiii... more CONTENTS Editors' Introduction ... vii Acknowledgements ... xi List of Illustrations ... xiii A Note on the Text and Translation ... xv Introduction: I.B. Thomas and the First Yoruba Novel ... 3 Itan Igbesi-Aiye Emi Segilola, Eleyin'ju Ege, Elegberun Oko L'aiye (by I.B. Thomas) ... 84 The Life History of Me, Segilola, of the fascinating eyes (translation by Karin Barber) ... 85 Ancillary texts in Yoruba (by various authors) ... 262 Ancillary texts in English (translation by Karin Barber) ... 263 The Life Story of Me, Segilola (translation serialised in Akede Eko, 1931-2) ... 363 References ... 413 Index ... 417
... say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries ofreprese... more ... say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries ofrepresentation, such as ... evoke smaller, regional or ethnic groupings, like the Igbo in Achebe'snovels or the ... nial dimension which co-exists with, but also transcends, the local affirmation of ...
This paper makes a very preliminary and provisional attempt to relate the discussion in Jane Guye... more This paper makes a very preliminary and provisional attempt to relate the discussion in Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004) of disjunction, thresholds, and multiple scales of value characteristic of economies in the Atlantic zone with the disjunction, profusion, and fragmentation characteristic of artistic genres of the region, especially praise poetry. It suggests that their underlying common property is an intense focus on the making and unmaking of persons. In a region where social and political self-realization is open-ended and depends upon acquiring people, and where people are transactable, transitions between multiple conditions of personhood can take place, but some thresholds cannot be crossed. One of the key ethnographic examples in Marginal Gains—the Niger Delta—is revisited to suggest possible lines of further inquiry into this aspect of the originality of cultural production in the zone of the Atlantic trade.
Pleasure in language arises from the creativity of everyday life. Africa’s historical and ethnogr... more Pleasure in language arises from the creativity of everyday life. Africa’s historical and ethnographic record is full of striking examples of linguistic play. Three scenes of Yorùbá linguistic creativity illustrate this: praise poetry in a small town, a traveling popular theater, and early Yorùbá newspapers. Each yields distinctive pleasures, but central to all of these is the act of mutual recognition of forms of words and attunement to the linguistic production of others. Barber suggests that verbal arts bring to consciousness the fundamental processes by which sociality is constituted and may thus provide a potential starting point for social theory from “within.”
... Yoruba language and literature. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Afolayan, Adebisi. PUBL... more ... Yoruba language and literature. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: Author: Afolayan, Adebisi. PUBLISHER: University Press (Ibadan, Nigeria and Ife). SERIES TITLE: YEAR: 1982. PUB TYPE: Book (ISBN 978154273X [pbk]). VOLUME/EDITION: ...
An archive of ephemera seems almost a contradiction in terms. If archives come into being because... more An archive of ephemera seems almost a contradiction in terms. If archives come into being because governments and individuals preserve papers they consider to be worth keeping, then an archive should be a crystallisation of past and present values concerning texts. Most of Nigeria's archives are in fact that kind of crystallisation, whether they are local government records, newspaper collections, Arabic-language chronicles, or little-known collections of personal letters and diaries, preserved because the individuals concerned, and subsequently their heirs, had a sense of their value.
Ifá is a divination system practised by highly trained specialists in the Yorùbá-speaking areas o... more Ifá is a divination system practised by highly trained specialists in the Yorùbá-speaking areas of West Africa. The geomantic system of sixteen signs from which a total of 256 figures are derived is widespread and is believed to have originated in Arabic Muslim cultures. But the remarkable corpus of poetry attached to the geomantic system is peculiar to Yorùbá culture. During a divination session the diviner manipulates his instruments to yield one or more figures, and then recites and interprets one or more of the large body of verses attached to that figure. The extent of the total corpus is unknown, but it is certain that it runs to thousands of verses. All the verses share the same basic structure. Each narrates an antecedent divination session performed by a legendary or primordial diviner for a client whose subsequent fortunes are then narrated. The rigid structure of each verse and of the system as a whole does not prevent adaptation and incorporation of new elements. This co...
The ‘postcolonial’ criticism of the 1980s and 1990s — which both continues and inverts the ‘Commo... more The ‘postcolonial’ criticism of the 1980s and 1990s — which both continues and inverts the ‘Commonwealth’ criticism inaugurated in the 1960s — has promoted a binarized, generalized model of the world which has had the effect of eliminating African-language expression from view. This model has produced an impoverished and distorted picture of ‘the colonial experience’ and the place of language in that experience. It has maintained a centre-periphery polarity which both exaggerates and simplifies the effects of the colonial imposition of European languages. It turns the colonizing countries into unchanging monoliths, and the colonized subject into a homogenized token: ‘that most tedious, generic hold-all, “the postcolonial Other” ’, as McClintock puts it — an Other whose experience is determined so overwhelmingly by his or her relation to the metropolitan centre that class, gender and other local historical and social pressures are elided.1 Despite intermittent claims to specificity, ...
CONTENTS Editors' Introduction ... vii Acknowledgements ... xi List of Illustrations ... xiii... more CONTENTS Editors' Introduction ... vii Acknowledgements ... xi List of Illustrations ... xiii A Note on the Text and Translation ... xv Introduction: I.B. Thomas and the First Yoruba Novel ... 3 Itan Igbesi-Aiye Emi Segilola, Eleyin'ju Ege, Elegberun Oko L'aiye (by I.B. Thomas) ... 84 The Life History of Me, Segilola, of the fascinating eyes (translation by Karin Barber) ... 85 Ancillary texts in Yoruba (by various authors) ... 262 Ancillary texts in English (translation by Karin Barber) ... 263 The Life Story of Me, Segilola (translation serialised in Akede Eko, 1931-2) ... 363 References ... 413 Index ... 417
... say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries ofreprese... more ... say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries ofrepresentation, such as ... evoke smaller, regional or ethnic groupings, like the Igbo in Achebe'snovels or the ... nial dimension which co-exists with, but also transcends, the local affirmation of ...
This paper makes a very preliminary and provisional attempt to relate the discussion in Jane Guye... more This paper makes a very preliminary and provisional attempt to relate the discussion in Jane Guyer's Marginal Gains (2004) of disjunction, thresholds, and multiple scales of value characteristic of economies in the Atlantic zone with the disjunction, profusion, and fragmentation characteristic of artistic genres of the region, especially praise poetry. It suggests that their underlying common property is an intense focus on the making and unmaking of persons. In a region where social and political self-realization is open-ended and depends upon acquiring people, and where people are transactable, transitions between multiple conditions of personhood can take place, but some thresholds cannot be crossed. One of the key ethnographic examples in Marginal Gains—the Niger Delta—is revisited to suggest possible lines of further inquiry into this aspect of the originality of cultural production in the zone of the Atlantic trade.
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