Response | Pius Adesanmi
Introit: Cosmopolitan Rootedness
An E-Symposium on Paul Tiyambe Zeleza's Inaugural Lecture of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professorship, University of Illinois at Chicago, January 30, 2008
Welcome to the first e-symposium of The Zeleza Post, a new feature aimed at reinforcing the site's mission as a bazaar of Africanist, pan-Africanist, and Black Diasporic intellection. As occasion demands, The Zeleza Post will convene discussions in this special e-format on issues germane to the politics and production of knowledge in/on Africa and its polymorphous diasporic unfoldings. I am particularly pleased and honored to convene this inaugural edition dedicated, most auspiciously, to an engagement of the spectacular intellectual/scholarly trajectory and monumental oeuvre of one of the most humble African polymaths I ever been privileged to encounter, Paul Tiyambe Zeleza.
Paul Zeleza's inaugural lecture, "In Search of the Diaspora: A Personal and Intellectual Odyssey", delivered on January 30, 2008 on his accession to a Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professorship, University of Illinois at Chicago, provides the inflatus for this exercise. Four eminent Africanists, Professors Amina Mama, Ato Quayson, Ken Harrow, and Sanya Osha have graciously agreed to reflect on this lecture as a way of mapping the significance of Paul Zeleza's work to African and Black Diasporic studies and the rich possibilities Zeleza's oeuvre opens up in the field.
Although I prefer to let the lecture and the four responses speak for themselves, I propose two anecdotal teasers as an entry point into the towering impact of Zeleza's work. When I invited Ken Harrow to be part of this symposium and sent him the full text of Zeleza's lecture, I must have caught this seasoned Africanist in one of those unmediated moments of instinctive reaction. An enthusiastic response popped up almost immediately in my mailbox, expressing Harrow's pleasant and positive agony: where/how does one even begin to engage this monumental oeuvre?
How do you engage Zeleza's work? Where do you even begin? The eternal positive agony of anyone who stands in awed contemplation of this body of work! My own positive agony started in my days at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, long before Paul Zeleza became my mentor at The Pennsylvania State University. In Ibadan, I moved in an intellectual circuit that was assailed by the avalanche of poco-pomo (Zeleza prefers "the posts") theorizations produced in North American academe and dumped on discursive spaces in the Global South. As we consumed these chaotic knowledges, we worried about the health of African studies since a great deal of what we read was a cocktail of turgid theorizing, syntaxic amphigory, and impenetrable grandiloquence, all hallmarks of newfangled knowledge production strategies in American academe. This was the period when the gods of poco/pomo were winning medals at the International Bad Writing Contest (also labeled ‘The Best of Bad Writing') organized annually by Philosophy and Literature, a journal based in New Zealand. Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha won gold and silver respectively in the 1998 edition of the competition. How do you write Africa in a situation where the American academic imperium, home to some of Africa's most prominent thinkers, was turning knowledge into the "esoteric whisper of an excluding tongue", to quote the poet, Niyi Osundare? We got our answer in the prose of Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. His books were available at the University library and his beautiful, engaging, and accessible prose taught and reassured us that we did not need to aspire to Bad Writing medals in New Zealand to produce theoretically sophisticated, profound, and engaging knowledges on Africa.
Why were Paul Zeleza's works available to us then in Ibadan? Because of his self-conscious politics of publishing some of his significant work in Africa, thereby escaping the situation in which some of the continent's best works are published in Euro-America and cannot be accessed by ‘home audiences'. This astute politics has ensured that Zeleza remains in permanent intellectual communion with his audiences and admirers in Africa even when he is physically located in Britain, Jamaica, Canada, or the United States. That, for me, is the true meaning of his cosmopolitan rootedness.
Enjoy the symposium!