Professor Akin Adesokan

Akin Adesokan, worked with TheNEWS magazine, published by Independent Communications Network Limited in Lagos, Nigeria, before travelling to the United States for further studies.

In March 1993, Adesokan and three editors of TheNEWS magazine (left to right, Bayo Onanuga, , Seye Kehinde, Dapo Olorunyomi and Akin Adesokan) were sent to Ikoyi Prison by Justice Olugbani of the Lagos High Court, where they spent one week over an alleged ‘criminal libel case’.

Left to right, Bayo Onanuga, , Seye Kehinde, Dapo Olorunyomi and Akin Adesokan

A dividend of the detention was being incarcerated in the same prison space with Fela, who was then facing a murder charge. The journalists interviewed him.

Read the Fela interview here

Adesokan, now an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, is a writer and scholar. His award-winning first novel, Roots in the Sky, was published in 2004. His 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. He co-edited Celebrating D. O. Fágúnwà: Aspects of African and World Literary History (2017) on the work of Daniel Fágúnwà, the pioneer Yoruba novelist. His new book, Everything is Sampled, has just been published. In this interview, Adesokan discusses issues in the book, writing, teaching and more. Excerpts:

Everything Is Sampled appreciates the work of several generations of African writers, directors, and artists. Why did you decide to undertake this assignment?

Sometime in mid-2010, I wrote a short reflection on creative ways to think about digital and new media in relation to literature, to film, video, art and music. It was an open, question-based sort of inquiry—not a proposal or anything prescriptive, just something to stimulate thinking about relatively new trends in artistic production, and how one might write about those trends. I shared it with some of my colleagues in the African Studies Programme at Indiana University and a healthy cohort of scholars seemed taken with those questions, and in a year or two we started a collaborative research project called New Media and Literary Initiatives in Africa, which we later branded NeMLiA. Between 2015 and 2018, we held a series of seminars, workshops, and symposia—the sorts of modes that scholars typically use to share their ideas. In the fall semester of 2011, I chose to bring some of the same questions to the classroom by teaching a course on African Literature and Other Arts. It was an old course in the book, but it occurred to me that it might be useful to share those questions with upper-undergraduate students. I taught the course a number of times, and the two “platforms”—the research initiative and the course—became the means by which most of the ideas for the book began to germinate.

After Roots in the Sky, you are yet to bless us with another novel. Is something in the works?

Yes, something is always in the works for a writer, even if that is not visible as a published book. It’s true that Roots in the Sky appeared nearly twenty years ago, and it is legitimate to wonder what has happened to my creative writing, particularly given that I have quite visible scholarly output as well. I have written more fiction than “scholarship” in the years between, as a matter of fact, but, for a writer, a book does not exist if it is not published. Publishing is a very complex and brutally subjective system. One needs several elements to align to break through this subjective fortress, because you can’t always hold anyone accountable for how that system works or doesn’t. You can’t take it out on an editor who rejects your work, or set up a shrine to the one who accepts it. You could, of course, but that’s a waste of time. Taste, subtle or overt ideological outlooks about value, what “sells,” whom you happen to meet and where—these are the things that come into play. Just yesterday, in Minneapolis, I was having a conversation about this issue with a friend, an American scholar, who has managed to publish a book for a general audience, and his journey testifies to the totally fortuitous nature of this system. I don’t complain any longer about this. One of the things I have been doing consistently through the forms of my writing, as well as through other institutional activities, is to work out a space, not just for myself, where a vision unbeholden to systematic exclusions might find its expression.

How easy was it for you to transit from journalism to the academy, especially in a different country?

It was not easy! I’m not even sure that it’s over, or that I desire such a transition. The first phase took five years of study in such a highly competitive environment as Cornell University’s graduate programme, reading different kinds of texts, being introduced to a diversity of artistic cultures—cinematic, musical, literary, political. But it helps to know what you want to do, and to carefully identify those who can help you with the tools for doing it. Graduate study is mostly a matter of working with mentors who know various methods to identify which of those methods are suitable to the materials that interest you. I was lucky to be in a grad school where such mentors were plenty, both within and outside Cornell, and outside the university as such.

Aside your new book, tell us about other scholarly projects you have been involved in since you left Nigeria?

Apart from NeMLiA that I described earlier, I have been part of the Fagunwa Study Group which focuses on different aspects of African literary cultures, using the visionary template of D. O. Fagunwa as a launching pad. I have also done curatorial work with the Chimurenga Chronic, based in Cape Town, South Africa, and a catalogue of FESTAC ’77 is one output of that. In various ways, these collaborations have expanded my outlook and given me new ideas of what to write about, and how to do it.

What courses do you teach and why did you choose them?

I teach courses in African literature, versions of diasporic and “world literature,” as well as on African cinema, Nollywood, and global/postcolonial films. These I do at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I choose these topics within my fields because though teaching might appear as if you are passing on what you know on to others who don’t know, the process of teaching itself, if it is done with genuine interest, is that of finding out, through dialogue with students, what might be going on in each text. To go back to the story about my latest book, the fact that a book like Everything Is Sampled developed partly out of classroom instruction means that I didn’t know everything when I set out to teach that course.

What does it take to prepare students for a writing career?

That is a difficult question. I doubt that there’s a size that fits all. What I have done with my students is to continuously advise them to choose a subject they are passionate about, that they don’t think of study or writing as “careers,” but as means of finding out what their true temperaments are. Also, I encourage them to be self-questioning, to read for fun, read newspapers, magazines, old books…

What makes a good or great writer? Awards or what?

These are the kinds of questions I don’t always entertain because they are subjective and hardly ever produce a satisfactory response. Awards are a recent phenomenon; they became ubiquitous after World War II. And we know that literature, the arts in general, are very old, even if we limit dating to the Renaissance…even in more recent eras, in the 20th century for instance, the only writers who won any awards got the Nobel Prizes, or some such honours in Western nations, like Spain, Italy, and France. Awards are part of what a scholar, James English, has called “the economy of prestige.” However, writers from African or Latin American countries tend to think of awards as a measure of literary or artistic value because that is how they have been socialised. I don’t know about great writers, but what makes a great work is the sum of attention it receives over the ages.

What does your writing process look like?

An image, a fragment of a song, could be the trigger. The other day I heard a line from a Nat King Cole song that I have played continuously for more than two decades but hadn’t picked up on: “I’m an errand-boy of rhythm…send me!” I said, “Wow!” I quickly went to my notebook and wrote that down, among the notes I’d been taken for nearly three years for a novel about a musician. In that novel, the musician will say those words at some point, in some version. I’m no longer sure if Cole added “send me,” but that doesn’t matter. Note-takings, writing long passages of dialogues, writing up character sketches, these are parts of the process of imagining a book.

Is there any correlation between migration and the muse? Is it possible for a writer to lose steam after leaving home?

It depends on one’s temperament. Speaking for myself, I certainly haven’t experienced any loss of steam. I have never thought of Nigeria as something to leave behind or carry with me. Living creatively does not encourage me to think in those terms. It is enough to actively inhabit one’s time and place, depending on how you imagine those. For a writer, any creative person, what is key to staying creative is living in ways that enhance creativity.

The summer is around the corner. Do you have book recommendations?

Continue Olukorede Yishau’s interview with Adesokan from the source: The Nation