This book examines the depiction of the Delta region of Nigeria through literature and other cultural art forms. The Niger Delta has been thrust into the global limelight due to resource extraction and conflict, but it is also a region with a rich culture, environment, and heritage. The creative imagination of the area’s artists has been fuelled by the area’s pressing concerns of indigenous peoples, minority discourse, environmental degradation, climate change, multinational corporations' greed, dictatorship, and people’s struggle for control of their resources. Taking a holistic approach to the Niger Delta experience, this book showcases artistic responses from literature, visual arts, and performances (such as masquerades, dances, and festivals). Chapters cover authors, artists, and performers such as Ben Okri, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Isidore Okpewho, J.P. Clark, and Bruce Onobrakpeya, as well as topics like the famous Benin bronze figures and Urhobo Udje dance. Affirming the wealth and diversity of the region which continues to inspire creative artistic productions, The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta will be of interest to researchers of African literature, arts, and other cultural productions.

This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa. The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group. Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.

This book examines the depiction of the Delta region of Nigeria through literature and other cultural art forms. The Niger Delta has been thrust into the global limelight due to resource extraction and conflict, but it is also a region with a rich culture, environment, and heritage. The creative imagination of the area's artists has been fuelled by the area's pressing concerns of indigenous peoples, minority discourse, environmental degradation, climate change, multinational corporations' greed, dictatorship, and people's struggle for control of their resources. Taking a holistic approach to the Niger Delta experience, this book showcases artistic responses from literature, visual arts, and performances (such as masquerades, dances, and festivals). Chapters cover authors, artists, and performers such as Ben Okri, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Isidore Okpewho, J.P. Clark, and Bruce Onobrakpeya, as well as topics like the famous Benin bronze figures and Urhobo Udje dance. Affirming the wealth and diversity of the region which continues to inspire creative artistic productions, The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta will be of interest to researchers of African literature, arts, and other cultural productions.

This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa. The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group. Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.

Literature remains one of the few disciplines that reflect the experiences, sensibility, worldview, and living realities of its people. Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways. Politics itself has come to intersect and impact on most, if not all, aspects of the African reality. This relationship of literature with African people's lives and condition forms the setting of this study. Tanure Ojaide's Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature: Personally Speaking belongs with a well-established tradition of personal reflections on literature by African creative writer-critics. Ojaide's contribution brings to the table the perspective of what is now recognized as a "second generation" writer, a poet, and a concerned citizen of Nigeria's Niger Delta area.

Engaging and interrogating the idea of a 'Global Africa', this book examines how African literary and cultural productions have changed over the years due to the social and political influences brought about by increased globalisation. Tanure Ojaide takes a variety of European theoretical concepts and applies these to African literature, oral traditions, culture, sexuality, political leadership, environmentalism, and advocacy, demonstrating the universality of the African experience. Challenging African literary artists and scholars to think creatively about the future of the culture and literature, this new collection of literary and cultural criticism from scholar-writer Tanure Ojaide is an essential read for students and scholars of African literature and culture.

Engaging and interrogating the idea of a 'Global Africa', this book examines how African literary and cultural productions have changed over the years due to the social and political influences brought about by increased globalisation. Tanure Ojaide takes a variety of European theoretical concepts and applies these to African literature, oral traditions, culture, sexuality, political leadership, environmentalism, and advocacy, demonstrating the universality of the African experience. Challenging African literary artists and scholars to think creatively about the future of the culture and literature, this new collection of literary and cultural criticism from scholar-writer Tanure Ojaide is an essential read for students and scholars of African literature and culture.

This book explores the "battles" of words, songs, poetry, and performance in Africa and the African Diaspora. These are usually highly competitive, artistic contests in which rival parties duel for supremacy in poetry composition and/or its performance. This volume covers the history of this battle tradition, from its origins in Africa, especially the udje and halo of the Urhobo and Ewe respectively, to its transportation to the Americas and the Caribbean region during the Atlantic slave trade period, and its modern and contemporary manifestations as battle rap or other forms of popular music in Africa. Almost everywhere there are contemporary manifestations of the more traditional, older genres. The book is thus made up of studies of contests in which rivals duel for supremacy in verbal arts, song-poetry, and performance as they display their wit, sense of humor, and poetic expertise.

In The Activist, Nigeria's acclaimed poet, Tanure Ojaide, brings his sharp sensibilities and writing skills to prose storytelling. The protagonist makes a reverse trip from America to a home whose young and able are straining at the leash to escape to the perceived comforts of the West. Ojaide weaves a compelling narrative that illuminates the contradictions of state and society in contempoary Africa. The Activist, however, is more than testimonial literature. It is visionary and bold as it attempts to answer the eternal question: What is to be done? At this moment, this book could not be more timely.

Love Gifts is a love sequence: the poetic rendering of the relationship between the minstrel and his muse over a long period. The poet uses the relationship of the two personages to investigate the human condition; hence the poems deal with dreams, desires, frustrations, hopes, contentment, and seeking meaning in life. The poetic canvas links the two figures to other relationships and happenings of their time in an all-embracing manner. In a way, minstrel and muse, lovers, are in these "songs" sharing a unique relationship with readers as they affirm their humanity and tell the complicated passage they navigate hourly and daily as members of a particular society. The relationship develops from the inexperience of neophytes, unsteady in their ways, to the stage of adepts who are sure of themselves and their "rites." The poems are thus a sort of courtship sequence.

The celebrated Nigerian writer Tanure Ojaide relates here his experience of living in the United States where he has been based teaching and writing since 1996. Drawing the Map of Heaven picks up where his earlier memoir, Great Boys. An African Childhood which charted his upbringing in Nigeria by his Grandmother, left off. Less a purely personal tale and more a story of the many other African immigrants in the United States Ojaide in the text uses "we" to speak collectively for a traditionally communal society now residing in an individualistic setting. As much a reflection of an African background as an American experience Drawing the Map of Heaven is a unique portrait of the African in the United States

The Old Man in a State House and Other Stories is a literary canvas which captures the restless matrix that is today's Africa: the corruptive influence of a corrosive oil economy, environmental degradation, wealth and hubris, love and more. Tanure Ojaide has published sixteen collections of poetry, a memoir, three novels, two short story collections and scholarly works. He has numerous literary prizes and is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Set in the Niger Delta this novel tells the tale of a women's struggle for equality in a traditional patriachal society. Against the backdrop of a once-in-a-generation festival at which the one chosen by the gods performs the dance of "the mother mask," Ojaide weaves a tale of suspense while at the same time displaying the traditions and religious beliefs that define the Niger Delta.

The Beauty I Have Seen. A Trilogy comprises three phases in a poetic journey, ranging from the poet (here called a minstrel) as a public figure, a traveller and observer of humanity, to one grounded in the landscape and fate of his native land. In the various sections of "The Beauty I have Seen," "Doors of the Forest" and "Flow and other Poems," Tanure Ojaide expresses multifarious experiences, private and public, that capture the poet's sensitive life in sensuous images. In these poems that flow like a narrative, form and content fuse into a mature poetic voice at once passionate and restrained, relaxed and poignant.

This is a pioneering work on Urhobo language, and since language is not the restricted domain of only scholars of linguistics, other aspects of the language or issues that impinge on language use are also discussed in this collection of essays by a eleven experts drawn from research institutes and universities. Since literature is a vehicle of language, the proverbs and axioms of the language as well as the oratorical and performance traditions in Urhobo are also covered competently. Other cultural aspects, especially music, are also seen as enhancers of the language. To underscore the significance of religion and language, some contributors here examine the relationship between the Urhobo language and Christian evangelisation and between the language and the people's belief systems. Another also explores the place of language in what has come to be known as Urhobo "disco" music. The essays reinforce each other and some points are repeated for emphasis because of their cultural significance. The closeness of several topics, especially the challenges of the language and culture and on evangelisation in Urhobo as well as Gospel music in Urhobo, is intended to exhaustively open up the Urhobo language debate." Tanure Ojaide is Professor of African-American and African Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches African/Pan-African literature and art. Rose Aziza is the Head of Department of Languages and Linguistics and Director of the Urhobo Studies Programme at the Delta State University in Nigeria

Tanure Ojaide is an award-winning writer, both creative and academic. This collection of his essays and lectures from over the past decade, addresses issues of culture and literature from a personal African perspective. The focus of this book is African culture and its imaginative productions in the arts, especially in literature. The author also examines the direction of African culture and its artistic creations in a global age. The titles of the essays and lectures are: the challenges of the African writer today; African culture and the New World Order; nativity and the creative process: the Niger Delta in my poetry; African culture today; divine mentoring in poetry and its performance; self, myth and historical consciousness: an African writer's reflection; Nigerian literature in the 21st century: what direction?; whose English?: the African writer and the language issue; countering terror in the literary world: the example of activism; and anxieties and hopes: recent African poetry. Tanure Ojaide's awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988, 1997), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), and the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Award (1988, 1994, and 2003). He is also the recipient of the 2006 UNC Charlotte's First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award for his writing and academic accomplishments, and is a Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the University of Maiduguri, and is currently Professor of African-American and African Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he teaches African/Pan-African literature and art.

The Nobel Laureate's reputation as a dramatist tends to cloud his poetic achievement, and in modern African literature, poetry lives in the shadow of fiction. The criticism of Soyinka's poetry has so far centred on his themes of individuality and death, his imagery, and on the controversy over his authenticity, obscurity and difficulty. Here, in a new approach, an academic himself and one of the leading younger generation of African poets, discusses critically the voice and viewpoint of the poet with the object of establishing Soyinka's persona. The book covers the personality and world view of the man, as revealed in his poetry.

A new poetic work by one of Nigeria's foremost contemporary poets, I Want to Dance is an extended song cycle, divided into three parts. In the song, the poetic voice undergoes a journey of experience from west to east and night to day and reflects upon moving away from and returning to home.

These ten short stories, of varying length, intensity and focus, are the first by Ojaide, published in the genre. The title story concerns the spiritual and sexual illusions, confusions and realities to which a young Nigerian girl, the daughter of a pastor, and the people in her milieu, are subjected. In a story entitled 'I Used to Drive a Mercedes', the author satirises the life of a military general, Alfred, and his materialistic and glamour-seeking wife. He juxtaposes the wealth and position of Alfred's youth and the pinnacle of his achievements: the purchase of a Mercedes, with the dishevelled madness of his old age: by which time his car has been destroyed and his wife has left him. Another story, 'The BookCase', is about a well- educated and vivacious woman's efforts to publish aground breaking book. In what becomes an all-consuming struggle, she ends up paying for her ambition with her life, and only achieves recognition posthumously.

This work takes in two collections of poetry. The poems of Delta Blues protests against the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta, and the devastation unleashed upon local populations, victims, and caught up in the race for oil. The younger poet dedicates his work to Ken Saro Wiwa, and other civil-rights activists. He writes about the irony of their mortality, which was, their last resort and only threat; their death was the final protest. The poet contrasts the natural heritage of the river, a vital food and water source, with barrels of oil, which bring little benefit to the people of the river. He believes that remembering the past and the dead may be the only way of preventing history repeating itself. Ojaide has won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Africa region and the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Prize twice. He has performed and been translated around the world, and is regarded as a leading voice amongst the new (younger) generation.