1st Tejumola Olaniyan Memorial Lecture 

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This presentation tracks the changing dispositions for theatricality in contemporary Nigerian political and popular culture. It ponders the persistence of theatricality as a dimension of Nigerian and African civic culture under varied political dispensations. It also considers the extent to which new media technologies have or have not fundamentally altered the functions of theatricality in the African world. An examination of the interface between media and theatricality in Nigerian popular culture serves in this paper as the point of departure for a reflection on the nature of theatricality in twenty-first century Nigeria, as well as the import and potential outcomes of current forms of theatricality for political and civic culture in the present age.

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Moradewun Adejunmobi is a professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is a scholar of African literature and African popular culture. She has published widely on these subjects. She is the author of the books, JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar as well as Vernacular Palaver; Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa. She also edited the first edition of the Routledge Handbook of African Literature with Carli Coetzee in 2019.

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While her interests in African screen media and textual culture are wide ranging, her current research focuses on three principal areas. The first, and a longstanding area of research interest relates to instances of multilingualism, translation, and intercultural communication in African literature and popular culture. Her publications in this area investigate how authors, performers, corporations, and fans navigate instances of multilingualism and translation in African popular culture as well as in African literature. An additional branch of her research considers the circulation trajectories and regimes of value for African popular film, with a focus on Nollywood and the films of the Nigerian film industry. Her current project explores what the emergence and growth of Nollywood indicates about the processes and interventions that facilitate an encounter between different kinds of texts and different kinds of publics and the assessments made of these texts. A final area of Adejunmobi’s research concerns African fantasy and science fiction, with special attention to the intersection between magic, spirituality, and science in older as well as more recent African and African diasporic fiction.