Description: Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics covers the major issues in Yorùbá history and politics, offering through narratives of the past and present a solid understanding of one of the most popular ethnic groups in Africa.
Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics covers the major issues on Yorùbá history and politics, thus offering a solid understanding of one of the most popular ethnic groups in Africa. With a careful blend of sources and methods, narratives on the past and present, the book manages to present a long history as the backdrop to complicated contemporary politics. Contributors: Tunde M. Akinwumi, Olufunke A. Adeboye, R. T. Akinyele, Aribidesi Usman, Tunde Oduwobi, Olufemi Vaughan, Abolade Adeniji, Jean-Luc Martineau, Ann O'Hear, Rasheed Olaniyi, Charles Temitope Adeyanju, Julius O. Adekunle, Funso Afolayan, Olayiwola Abegunrin. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.Ann Genova is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.
Brief description: RASHEED OYEWOLE OLANIYI is Professor of African History at the Department of History, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He has several publications in peer-reviewed journals and books on Economic and Social History focusing on migration and diaspora studies, conflict and peacebuilding, identity politics, and vigilantism.
Review Quotes: Toyin Falola and Ann Genova have done Yorùbá studies an excellent service by thoughtfully bringing together a collection of essays that draws from the inspiration of previous works but avoids the pitfalls of rehashing old ideas. The result is an imaginative, refreshing, and beautiful scholarship without the pretensions of textual and theoretical jargons. We finally have that long-sought single volume that superbly captures major and diverse historical themes in Yorùbá experience from the precolonial to the present in wholesome interdisciplinary frameworks. Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics is a superior work in the genre, an excellent book to teach and think with on a myriad of topics relevant to contemporary Africa. ----Akin Ogundiran, Associate Professor of History, Florida International University, Miami