Akinwumi Adesokan

Biography

I am a writer and scholar. My first novel, Roots in the Sky (Festac Books), was published in 2004, and my first critical study, Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (Indiana University Press, 2011), is a multi-disciplinary work which explores the generic and cultural consequences of globalization by focusing on conceptual patterns in Nollywood, African cinema, and postcolonial writings. The range of films, books, authors and artists that I analyze in the book includes continental Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, and the US. My latest book, Everything Is Sampled (iupress.org), examines key texts, processes, practices, and figures in the shifting modes of production and circulation of African artistic forms with a focus on digital culture as the most currently decisive setting for these changes. I engage in research, teaching, and writing that are diversely preoccupied with “the poetics of engaged expatriation.” This is the development of a style suited to the apprehension of an intellectual or social figure whose publics are present but scattered, whose subject is visible in its density, simultaneously resisting and courting representation because s/he does not simply inhabit the primary context of that work. I have attempted an exploration of this “poetics” in an essay on the cinema of the Malian/Mauritanian filmmaker, Abderrahmane Sissako, published in Screen, the journal of cinema, in 2010. Subsequently, I have co-edited Celebrating D. O. Fágúnwà: Aspects of African and World Literary History (2017) on the work of Daniel Fágúnwà, the pioneer Yoruba novelist, and FESTAC ’77 a curated catalog that explores the afterlives of the international festival of African and Black Arts and Culture in Lagos in 1977.

Currently I focus my research and publishing interests, both creative and critical, on the impact of global demographic and technological changes on various kinds of artistic composition in long duration. This focus extends to the whole world without exception, but primarily from the standpoint of Black, diasporic and postcolonial intellectual traditions, especially in a manner that connects new ideas, forms, media, systems and practices to supposedly old ones.

Research Interests

• African Cinema

• Nollywood

• Globalization and Film

• Intersections of Print and Electronic Media

• Black/Postcolonial Artistic and Intellectual Traditions

• Cultural Theory

• Writing

Sample Courses

Undergraduate

Introduction to African Literature

Film and Media in the Global Context

African Cinema

Nollywood Films

Graduate

Black/Postcolonial Motions

Biopolitics and Postcolonial Discourse

Cinema and Decolonization

Media Theory

Recent Publications

“Sembene, Vieyra and the Making of Xala”

Sembene, Vieyra, and the Making of Xala | Film Quarterly | University of California Press (ucpress.edu)

September 10, 2024

“Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Birth of African Cinema”

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the Birth of African Cinema | Current | The Criterion Collection

September 19, 2022

“Seductive Solidarity: Comrade Lover and Other Demons”. In Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures. Grant Farred (ed.), 145-162. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022.