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The Ethics of African Studies in the Age of Oga Politics: A Response to Tejumola Olaniyan’s “African Literature in the Post-Global Age”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2017

Laura T. Murphy
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Abstract

In response to Olaniyan’s article “African Literature in the Post-Global Age: Provocations on Field Commonsense,” this paper suggests that Olaniyan’s conception of the “planetary” provides a metaphor for imagining a politics of responsibility in the post-global and anti-globalization age. The urgency for planetary thinking is framed within the current ascendancy of big man or “oga” politics represented by the rise of neoliberal populism around the world and in Huntingtonian “clash of civilizations” logic espoused by both elite nativists such as Donald Trump and grassroots ethnonationalists such as Boko Haram. The paper suggests that African studies continues to play a crucial and increasingly urgent role in amplifying, translating, and supporting various African ways of being and knowing that have long served as critiques of the disenfranchisement of those in global south.

Keywords

post-globalAfrican literaturehuman rightsbig man politicshumanitiesDonald Trumpoga
Type
Forum
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 4 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: African Genre , April 2017 , pp. 286 - 295
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

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