Great Thanks to the Toyin Falola Network and to Toyin Falola for their Enablement of My Work as Sn Independent Scholar

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

What can I say?

The Toyin Falola Network provides publishing opportunities for anyone, from any background, writing on anything.

You don't have an academic job?

No problem.

You have no PhD?

No problem.

You don't have a degree in the discipline in which you are writing or want to write?

No problem.

You don't have a track record of publishing in the field in question?

No problem.

All they are interested in is high quality, able to pass through the cleansing flames of critical assessment.

They are also able to request work from you if they think your orientation and standard suit what they want.

They are also able to make suggestions to you about book publication, by their own network or other publishers.

The network also runs the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group and the Yoruba Affairs Google group, a testing platform for ideas which is ready to publish all kinds of scholarship, litetature and thoughtful  pieces. 

This network has made a lot of my work possible.

Great thanks.

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

[Harrow, Kenneth]

toyin

if we got a manuscript proposal, the first thing we would do would not be to look at credentials. the first thing is to see if the proposal looks interesting.

credentials do not guarantee anything. i once had to eliminate chapter from a book i was editing on islam, and the chapter that went was by mazrui

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 5, 2022 3:46 AM
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Cc: Yoruba Affairs <yoruba...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Great Thanks to the Toyin Falola Network and to Toyin Falola for their Enablement of My Work as Sn Independent Scholar

 

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[Nimi Wariboko]

What Professor Harrow said is true. As an editor of a major journal, as one who sits on editorial boards, and as one who peer-reviews manuscripts, I can say that credentials are not important in the evaluation process. What you focus on is the sheer quality of the manuscripts. Besides, majority of the manuscripts one is often asked to review come double blind; so as a reviewer you know nothing about the writers and the authors do not know you. In fact, in processes where double blindness is not the gold standard, some scholars doubt if reviewers can be fair at all. 

These days, most publishers of book manuscripts, including major university presses, only keep one side of the review process blind. The reviewer knows the author but the author does not know the reviewer. This has its own problems. Some reviewers could be very hard on known names in their fields; harder on known names, top scholars than on junior or unknown names. Some could be soft, really soft on known names. 

To avoid these problems, sometimes I send some of my book manuscripts completely anonymized  to publishers. Bias against known names in the review process is increasingly becoming a problem. Some reviewers want to cut certain names to size or pick unnecessary theoretical fights with some big names behind the veil of anonymity. 

Even this kind of fights happens in the tenure and promotion review process. These days it is not uncommon for major US universities to ask those going for tenure, from assistant to associate professorship, for the names of certain reviewers who should not be allowed to reviews their publications. If the candidate can demonstrate that a particular reviewer, based on certain theoretical disagreements with his or her PhD supervisor, will block the promotions or never say anything positive about the former students of the candidate’s doctoral father or mother, the university might eliminate that biased assessor from the potential list of reviewers. Please note that this is high standard to meet and universities rarely accept the arguments of tenure and promotion candidates on this issue. The fact that this potential concession exists goes to show the existence of undue bias against known names and what some US universities are doing to be fair to candidates seeking promotions. Professor Falola can speak on all these better than I can. 

The bottom line:  I am only nuancing the arguments of Harrow and Adepoju. Thanks. 

Nimi Wariboko

Boston University.

On Jan 7, 2022, at 6:50 AM, Harrow, Kenneth <har...@msu.edu> wrote:



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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

thanks ken.

one comes across various manuscript vetting strategies.

i was struck once to see a call for papers from Europe or the US that insisted that those submitting proposals must have particular credentials, either a PhD or an academic post or both, not sure which. When I asked why, I was told its bcs the publishers are more comfortable with such credentials.

I  recall mentioning to an Igbo professor  in Nigeria more than a decade ago that I was writing on Igbo thought, making a comparison between that and Jewish cosmology. His response was ''are you Igbo?"

At the beginning of my journeys in Ifa studies, I mentioned my interest to a Yoruba scholar of Yoruba thought in a Nigerian university. She was nice and very helpful  but found my aspiration odd, wondering how a person outside the circle of  Yoruba esoterica could think he could  enter  the subject by jumping into the middle of the ocean of this disciplinary matrix, which she understood as Ifa. Find a realistic subject you can build an academic  career on, she urged, not trying to enter into something about which you have no clue, something in which you even have no lineage connection with, she stated.

This attitude has resonated, at less kind levels,  with my encounters with some  Yoruba people online and some Yoruba scholars outside Nigeria, restrictionists who become even more inflamed by my claims of making strategic innovations to such venerable Yoruba institutions as Ifa and Ogboni, rather than critically examining my rationale and methods.

So, I speak from a history of struggle against restrictive gatekeepers, people who are very different from my experience with the Falola Network, who often have even requested my work in relation to various disciplines, rather than me offering the work and seeking acceptance.

In contrast to such restrictionists, my academic publishing opportunities in Ifa, except for one essay I submitted purely on my own initiative, Ifa in relation to autobiographical theory and the letters and art of the Dutch/French artist Vincent van Gogh,  have come from discerning Yoruba scholars, such as Abiola Irele, who requested I write the 2011 Oxford Encylopedia of African Thought essays on Ifa/Odu, and on the Yoruba philsopy concept Ori, which I did, even though he might know I have no academic education in Yoruba, philosophy or religion.

He  also commissioned me to write the encyclopedia article on modern African art even though I have no academic education there, either. The writer of the companion essay, on traditional African art, was Suzanne Preston Blier, PhD Art History, Columbia, longtime Professor of Art History, Harvard, writing side by side with Adepoju, MA Literature, then graduate sudent in literature,  no PhD in anything.

I would  have gained other  prominent publications, in different fields, with Irele's suggestions, but my understanding of the opportunities he was offering was quite limited.

Almost all  my publications with the Falola Nework have been by invitation, except the one on women in spirituality  in the Palgrave Handbook of African Womens Studies. The essay on the significance of Yoruba philosophy to education in an issue of the Yoruba Studies Review, the article in the Falola book on the artist Victor Ekpuk, the one on African philosophies of art in the Adeshina/Falola book on  African Philosophy, the other on African environmental ethics in the Wariboko/Falola book on African ethics, those in the Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko book, the Ifa/Calvino,/Heidegger essay in the book on Africa in the changing global order, those on Falola's work in the Yoruba Studies Review, one of them even first published as an essay on Facebook.

Other essays  would also have been published on such requests if I had been better organised. Books would also have come out based on such suggestions, but im still in the process of working out my direction in relation to book publication. 

There are scholars highly academically trained in those various fields across the world which the network edtors  could easily reach, but they choose to request contributions from Adepoju who is largely self trained  in the fields in question, philosophy, art and Yoruba Studies.

So, Adepoju will  be particularly sensitive to such sterling values.

thanks

toyin

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

thanks Nimi.

politics everywhere.

i wonder, though, if those familiar with your work would not be able to identify it even without seeing your name attached to it.

unless perhaps its a book like The Charismatic City, which, to my very limited understanding, may be seen as  not sharing the theoretical universe that may be seen as operating as an undercurrent of various degrees of explicitness in some of your other major works. 

thanks

toyin

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[Harrow, Kenneth]

toyin, you touch on a sensitive point.

i like your word "gatekeepers." i know it has been applied in racial senses, or in the sense of qualifying to write about africa only if you are african.

toqueville might have been surprised about that; or montaigne. or anyone really.

if i were to write about where i have been living for the past 55 years, east lansing, i'd have to confess i am not really expert in the vast student culture here. i live in a neighborhood that is different from other wealthier ones in east lansing, which i know about by driving through or visiting a few friends. but i know the scope of my neighborhood well, having walked through it thousands of times.

but i don't know all the neighbors. some quite close i have exchanged a few words with, others nothing. some i almost never see. but i know the inhabitants of my house, me and liz. yet when liz went out yesterday, i wasn't really sure where she went or what she did. i have some idea. so, i know, really best, where i was, what i did.

yet, liz says my brain works differently from how i imagine it to work. i listen to her.

what can i really say about myself? that i exist? cogito ergo sum?

yet the cogito has been so dismantled and deconstructed for centuries, ending with freud who might say we never really know ourselves because we repress what we cannot bear to face, and the unconscious is the vast sea of our being.

toyin, keep plugging away at it. if all we can honestly say is that we know ourselves, then the more honest among us would have to say, we don't really know anything. dark matter, dark energy is unknowable.

so why continue, why write?

obviously because the rules for knowing posed by the gatekeepers are really only applications of their power.

there is a much more honest way for evaluation of knowledge to be exercised, and that comes not from who you are but what you know, or, sort of know.

some know more, and say it better.

they deserve to be published.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

har...@msu.edu

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From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovde...@gmail.com>

Sent: Friday, January 7, 2022 10:33 AM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Great Thanks to the Toyin Falola Network and to Toyin Falola for their Enablement of My Work as Sn Independent Scholar

 

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Thanks Ken.

"Some know more and say it better. They deserve to be published".

Toyin

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