The Africa Migration Report. Episode 1 Part 2. In Conversation with Profs. Losambe & Ojaide

Professors Lokangaka Losambe and Tanure Ojaide, editors of The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature (Routledge, 2024) respond to questions that include how Africa and Africans are defined, and by whom; orality, oral cultures and literature; the legacies of colonialism; and book distribution on the continent and in the diaspora. Professors Losambe and Ojaide where speaking during the Africa Migration Report Readings and Conversations session that was held online on Thursday, 3 October 2024. ABOUT THE HANDBOOK The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature (Routledge, 2024) introduces world literature readers to the transnational, multivocal writings of immigrant African authors. Covering works produced in Europe, North America, and elsewhere in the world, this book investigates three major aesthetic paradigms in African diasporic literature: the Sankofan wave (late 1960s–early 1990s); the Janusian wave (1990s–2020s); and the Offshoots of the New Arrivants (those born and growing up outside Africa). Written by well-established and emerging scholars of African and diasporic literatures from across the world, the chapters in the book cover the works of well-known and not-so-well-known Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone writers from different theoretical positionalities and critical approaches, pointing out the unique innovative artistic qualities of this major subgenre of African literature. The focus on the “diasporic consciousness” of the writers and their works sets this handbook apart from others that solely emphasize migration, which is more of a process than the community of settled African people involved in the dynamic acts of living reflected in diasporic writings. This book will appeal to researchers and students from across the fields of Literature, Diaspora Studies, African Studies, Migration Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. For more information, see: https://tinyurl.com/TRHNDL ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Lokangaka Losambe is the Frederick M. and Fannie C.P. Corse Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He previously taught African, African Diaspora and English literatures at universities in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Swaziland, and South Africa. His numerous publications include Postcolonial Agency in African and Diasporic Literature and Film: A Study in Globalectics; Borderline Movements in African Fiction; An introduction to the African Prose Narrative; Literature, the Visual Arts and Globalization in Africa and Its Diaspora (edited with Maureen Eke); Pre-colonial and Post-colonial Drama and Theatre in Africa (edited with Devi Sarinjeive); and The Routledge Handbook of the New African Diasporic Literature (edited with Tanure Ojaide). Dr. Losambe also served as the president of the African Literature Association (ALA) in 2012-2013. Educated at Ibadan and Syracuse Universities, Tanure Ojaide has published twenty-five collections of poetry, as well as four novels, five short story collections, three memoirs, and fourteen self-authored and co-authored scholarly books. He has won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Poetry Prize four times (1988, 1994, 2003, and 2011). His other awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1988), the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988), and the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988). He was the Winner of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s prestigious First Citizens Bank Scholar Medal Award for 2005. In 2016 he won both the African Literature Association's Folon-Nichols Award for Excellence in Writing and the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for the Humanities. In 2018 he co-won the Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. He has won the National Endowment for the Humanities grant, twice the Fulbright Senior Scholar fellowship, and twice the Carnegie African Diaspora Program fellowship. Ojaide is currently the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. ABOUT THE AFRICA MIGRATION REPORT READINGS AND CONVERSATIONS The Africa Migration Report Readings and Conversations brings together poets, writers and academics working at the intersection where fiction and non-fiction writing meets African migration for conversation around the theme. The sessions are part of the *Africa Migration Report Poetry Anthology Series*, which we are currently working on. The poetry anthology series was inspired by the Africa Migration Report: 2nd Edition, a report by the African Union and International Organisation on Migration, published in March 2024, which presents research on African migration and mobility, and on the status of continental integration policies as outlined in the African Union Agenda 2063: https://tinyurl.com/AMRpoetry The poetry anthology and readings and conversations are organised by Forced Migration and The Arts, CivicLeicester and Regularise.