George, Olakunle

Olakunle George

Professor of English

Overview

George's research and teaching focus on African literature, black diasporic literature, and postcolonial theory. He is author of Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (2003), winner of CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award, and African Literature and Social Change: Tribe, Nation, Race (2017). He co-edited The Encyclopedia of the Novel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) with Peter M. Logan [General Editor], Susan Hegeman, and Efraín Kristal. He also edited A Companion to African Literatures (Wiley Blackwell, 2021). His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature; Comparative Literature Studies; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Diacritics; Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Research in African Literatures; and Representations.

Brown Affiliations

English

Research Areas

African literary studies | cultural theory | discourses of the Black Atlantic | literary theory

Research

Research Overview

Olakunle George has research interests in African literature, Black Atlantic cultural criticism, postcolonial studies, and literary and cultural theory.

Funded Research

Fall 2006
Faculty Fellowship Award, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University
Project Title: "Pagans and Patriots: Conversion and the Text of Africa"

Fall 1996
Fellow, Humanities Center, University of Oregon
Project Title: "The Modernity of Anglophone African Fiction"

1995-96
Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
Project Title: "The Modernity of Anglophone African Fiction"

Scholarly Work

“Postcolonial Reverberations.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 36.1 (May 2016): 195-203.

“Literary Africa.” Africa in the World, the World in Africa, ed. Biodun Jeyifo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011. 29-49.

“The Oral-Literate Interface.” The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, ed. F. Abiola Irele. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009. 15-29.

“African Novels and the Question of Theory.” Teaching the African Novel, ed. Gaurav Desai. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009. 19-36.

“The National and the Transnational: Soyinka’s The Interpreters and Aké: The Years of Childhood.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 41.2/3 (Spring-Summer 2008): 279-297.

“The Narrative of Conversion in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God.” Comparative Literature Studies 42.4 (2005): 344-62.

"Representing 'Natives': Sol Plaatje and the Rhetoric of Difference," Postmodernism, Postcoloniality, and African Studies, ed., Zine Magubane (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), 167-200.

"Tragedy, Mimicry, and 'The African World,'" Death and the King's Horseman: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, ed. Simon Gikandi (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2003), 207-222; rpt. of "Cultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman."

"The 'Native' Missionary, the African Novel, and In-Between." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 36.1 (Fall 2002): 5-25.

"Alice Walker's Africa: Globalization and the Province of Fiction," Comparative Literature 53.4 (Fall 2001): 354-72.

"African Politics, African Literatures: Thoughts on Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject and Wole Soyinka's The Open Sore of a Continent," West Africa Review 2.1(August 2000). Online Journal www.westafricareview.com/war/vol2.1/2.1war.htm

Background

Education and Training

Year	Degree	Institution
1992	PhD	Cornell University
1990	MA	Cornell University
1986	MA	University of Ibadan
1984	BA	University of Ibadan

Honors and Awards

2018-19: Faculty Fellow, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women

2017-18: Haffenreffer Museum Faculty Fellow

Fall 2006: Faculty Fellowship Award, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University

2003: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award for Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters

Fall 1996: Faculty Fellow, Humanities Center, University of Oregon

1995-96: Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey

Researchers@Brown