ALA Lecture Series Presents:
Speaker: Chris Okonkwo on Fela Kuti in African Literature
Saturday January 25, 2025 @ 11:00 AM EST; London, 3:00 PM; Lagos, 4:00 PM; Johannesburg, 5:00 PM; Nairobi, 6:00 PM
Join us on the ALA YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaYYHGM8iraoQF48xeCnMKw
Chris Okonkwo is Professor of English and African and African American Literature at Florida State University. He is the author of two groundbreaking books: A Spirit of Dialogue: Incarnations of Ogbanje, the Born-to-Die, in African American Literature and Kindred Spirits: Chinua AchebeandToni Morrison, which won the 2022 College Language Association’s Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 African Literature Association’s Best Scholarly Book Award. In this lecture, Okonkwo discusses music legend and Afrobeat founder Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Okonkwo has identified twenty African novels in which “Fela” and/or his music, rebel spirit, ideology, persona is referenced, thematized, or incarnated. Although Fela has been the subject of extensive cultural, political, critical, gender, and media studies, these growing fictional “appearances,” which Okonkwo dubs “cameos,” are further instantiations of decades-long but critically understudied intermediality in African literature and have not, Okonkwo argues, been tracked, spotlighted, and/or problematized. In this talk Okonkwo hopes to vernacularize intermediality (music-literature connection) in terms of Igbo notion of akuko na egwu: story/storytelling and/in music; meditate on the Fela cameos; and intervene in what has been a stunning critical under-reading of Father Amadi in Adichie’s debut Purple Hibiscus in which Fela features prominently.
