Department of English

• Wednesday, May 17, 2023 - 11:00am to 2:00pm

FBH Faculty Lounge

Please join us on Wednesday, May 17th at 11 am in the FBH Faculty Lounge when Máyọ̀wá Ajibade will defend his dissertation, "Uses of the Eccentric: Reading the Political in African and African American Experimental Writing." "This dissertation models ways of reading twentieth and twenty-first century African and African American experimental writing beyond but not against references to topical social justice issues. Focusing primarily on novels but also analyzing essays, short stories, paratexts, and visual art, I show that the works of Carlene Hatcher Polite, Bessie Head, Renee Gladman, and Dambudzo Marechera, disrupt ways of reading Black literature that fixate on textual political commentary and, as a result, limit the awareness of the aesthetic, philosophical, and political features of this literature. I offer alternatives to such narrow ways of reading Black-authored literature in chapters addressing topics such as Polite’s depiction of desire, Head’s concept of softness, Gladman’s use of abstraction, and Marechera’s question about literary uselessness. Ultimately, I contribute to enduring and recently renewed methodological conversations within African and African American cultural studies about the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics." Committee: Margo Natalie Crawford (chair), Dagmawi Woubshet, Deborah Thomas, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (Cornell) The public presentation will begin at 11 am. At 12 pm, Máyọ̀wá will meet privately with his committee. We will reconvene in the FBH Faculty Lounge at 1 pm for a reception, where we'll toast the newly-minted Dr. Ajibade!