Dr. Oluseun Tanimomo
I hold a Ph.D. in Postcolonial Literature, Languages and Literary Studies from the University of Bremen, Germany. My dissertation focuses on “Contemporary African Novels as Narratives of World Risk Society”. My research interest include literary criticism, comparative literature, critical theory, fiction arts and humanities, cultural studies, essay writing and narratology literature.
While working on the ERC Project at Ghent University, Belgium under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Shola Adenekan and as funded by the European Research Council (ERC), my first research centered on a series of letters to the newspaper, Iroyin Yoruba; in these writings, several writers sought to ‘educate’ readers on the history of certain Yoruba towns.
An overarching goal, usually stated by the writers, was to provide the history of these towns so that the past would not be lost to the younger generation. In this sense, the writers saw themselves as ambassadors for their respective towns, and they appeared to anticipate Chinua Achebe’s idea of the writer as a teacher. This intention of writing to preserve also highlights these mini-histories within a whole as political and cultural inscriptions that attempt to legitimise the identities of descendants of these towns.
By analysing these letters by different authors about different Yoruba towns, my research examined the narrative framing of these histories. The importance of these towns in their geographical location and geopolitical importance to the overall project of ‘Yoruba nationhood’ will be analysed by evaluating their utilisation, their implication on the Yoruba project and argumentative aspects. By studying these letters on these towns, I demonstrated how the idea of being Yoruba is built not entirely on the linear connections with a centre or a progenitor but also by drawing on ideations of modern Yoruba sensibilities and contingent history.
The narrative template through which the writers and respondents establish their authorities and narratives will be analysed by engaging these texts with Hayden White’s concept of Metahistory, and Gilles DeLeuze and Felix Guatarri’s concept of the Rhizome.
My second research looks into how Daniel O. Fagunwa in his novels, Ògbójú Ọdẹ Nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀ and Igbó Olódùmarè, recount the stories of characters who traverse the world of marvellous beings. The importance of the novels as pioneering novels in the Yoruba literary corpus means both novels have generated copious attention from readers and critics alike. While on the surface, the novels tell the stories of ‘pre-modern’ characters, the ideational underpinning of both novels is underlined by ‘modern’ ideas of progress and development, especially in its resolution of conflicts and the argumentative aspects of the texts. It is in this way that Fagunwa’s texts participate in the ideological project of colonial modernity. The work, thus, looked at how the author presents risks and dangers as resolvable through self-autonomy and the will of the individual.
However, Fagunwa’s work does not limit its representations to a total valorisation of colonial modernity; instead, his works present a pastiche of characterisation and themes that see conviviality between worldviews. As such, his texts seem to imply that notions of enlightenment, progress and development are on a continuum and the Yoruba worldview already presents these as inherent to its construction of development and also creates avenues for the supplementarity of ideas.