Announcing the Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora
Vik Bahl
Ibadan Cultural Studies Group, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
Announces
The Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora
In pursuance of its mandate which includes the promotion of excellence in cultural studies, the Ibadan Cultural Studies Group, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, in collaboration with many African universities, is pleased to announce The Toyin Falola Annual International Conference on Africa and the African Diaspora. This conference will provide an international forum where scholars, researchers, graduate students, policy makers, and technocrats from all over the world will converge annually to address issues that relate to Africa and the Diaspora in the strict academic tradition, in order to extend the frontier of knowledge, explore possible collaboration on matters of knowledge and development, culture and global peace. The conference will provide a global forum designed to engage minds for ideation, intellection and distillation in various aspects of knowledge to advance the cause of Africa and people of African descent.
The conference is so named as an enduring legacy in honour of Professor Toyin Falola of the University of Texas at Austin, USA, in recognition of his tremendous achievements as a scholar and teacher of African and African American History. Dr. Toyin Falola is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, a creative writer, a foremost academic icon and certainly, and now the most celebrated published African/Black scholar of all times. In late March 2010, the publication of his 100th book received an acclaim. Two books were presented at the event to mark the great occasion, The Long Arm of Africa: The Prodigious Career of Toyin Falola (180pp), which contains the summary of each of Dr. Falola’s 100+ published books co-edited by Vik Bahl and Falola’s daughter, Bisola, and Toyin Falola: the Man, The Mask, The Muse, a 1015pp bio-critical study edited by Professor Niyi Afolabi. On Saturday evening of October 31, 2009, Dr. Falola was presented with the prestigious Africana Studies Distinguished Global Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award by Chancellor Charles Bantz of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis at the Awards Dinner for the 1st Public Scholars in Africana Studies International Conference on Globalization held in Indianapolis. The organizers of the Award had this to say on the selection of Dr. Falola for this significant award:
The presentation of the Africana Studies Distinguished Global Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award represents our best efforts to recognize an individual who can more accurately be described as the "quintessential ‘scholar's scholar,’" i.e., a person whose lifetime has been exemplified by the relentless search for knowledge in all of its various facets and whose total body of scholarship through the years has been considered by his/her peers to be of the highest level of excellence. We wanted to recognize a scholar who has developed a stellar global reputation because of the significant impacts his/her scholarship has had on the global academy and who has used his/her platform unselfishly to elevate others, particularly students, professional colleagues, and members of the public at large. We also wanted to recognize a scholar whose academic research has had transformative effects on the various global epistemological debates which have preoccupied scholars in his/her disciplinary area of focus through the years and whose work has provided an important platform for the development of an ongoing critical discourse with regard to the continuing relevancy of understanding and respecting African people, cultures, and ideologies, both in the past and contemporary time periods ... The academic world has run out of superlatives to describe the magnificent body of scholarship produced through the years by the indefatigable, Dr. Toyin Falola.
The above statement summarizes it all- the person and personality as a great mentor, coupled with his unparalleled academic achievements in the humanities foreground our choice of Dr Toyin Falola. An annual conference is the least we can put in place to sustain and ensure the continuity of what Professor Toyin Falola’s stands for— the promotion of excellence in Africa and the Diaspora scholarship.
Professor Ademola Dasylva
Co-coordinator, ICSG
toyin adepoju
According to one historian,Toyin Falola, singlehanded, has achieved more than the combined publication efforts of the first generation of African historians.He is also the author of two works of poetry,one of which is a large,lush hardback volume. He has also edited seven scholarly texts on aspects of African literature and one on an aspect of African art.His editing credits include two books on African health systems and five on religion in Africa.
Please forgive any mistakes in this list because reading through the description of his list of books is quite a task.It is work of the kind that requires one or two hours of uninterrupted attention.
On doing a Google search for his name I see that he has just been awarded the 2010 Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award at the University of Texas "established in 1976 to honor faculty members for outstanding teaching at the graduate level and mentoring of graduate students"
Awesome.
In 2004, I first came across his name when I kept seeing it as the author or editor of various books at the library of the School of Oriental and African Studies.If there are so many books to his name,then I wonder how many scholarly articles there are.I see that on his website he does not bother to list his articles.He lists his books year by year,beginning from 1983.This shows that from 1985 he began to publish at least two books a year.
I had to ask a lecturer at that university,"Who is this man?" We both had to express our sense of speechless admiration at this kind of prolific writing and publishing.
One looks at people like that from a distance,the way one looks at the pyramid of Khefra in the sands of Egypt.
How was it built? Through slave labour? How did the builders arrive at this level of engineering, particularly startling beceause as far as I know,there are no written records of this level of knowledge having been reached until centuries later?
The pyramids of Egypt are now described as most likely not built with slave labour.
Scholarship requires a lot of painstaking work.Keeping in mind that Falola is likely to have started publishing perhaps before the days of ease of writing with computers.
How do people achieve such productivity? How do they manage their time?How do they generate ideas?What are their motivations? How do such people address other aspects of their lives,both personal and professional?
Are the limitations on human productivity necessitated by time and the strictures of the human mind and body not absolute?
Are they not universally applicable to everybody? Are they applicable to everyone in the same manner?
All humans have one brain,two hands and two eyes.Everybody supposedly operates in terms of a 24 hour day.Everybody must undergo cognitive development from one stage of life to another,from one day to another.One cannot amass knowledge all at once, although one could experience unusual spurts of cognitive growth.Creativity also undergoes a feeding and a gestative process,as well as a process of expression,all of which takes time.These factors create limitations for the human being,particularly in relation to creativity.
I suspect,however,that human creativity might be less dependent on these factors than on a transformative capacity of the mind that facilitates the maximization of creative faculties, enabling one to transcend these limitations.
Magicians,mystics and writers of fantasy and science fiction mention the possibility of manipulating time.Within such manipulations one achieves more than expected because one operates in a time frame that is much slower than the conventional passing of time.In such a context,one can spend time developing and communicating ideas while little or no time at all has passed to conventional awareness.
I suspect such seeming manipulations are possible.
I suspect that they are enabled by a number of factors.One set of these factors is individual,personal,while another is environmental,both human and material.
While taking note of the value of formative developments in childhood,youth and early adulthood,when the character of the personality is being formed,one could argue for a number of personal factors.
One of these could be a sensitivity to one's own creative stimuli, those factors that stimulate one's creativity.
One also needs to be at home with oneself,understanding those subtle whispers that signal the emergence of new ideas.It would also be priceless to continuously cultivate a large and ever expanding fund of knowledge,either in a specific field,in various fields,or in a focus on one field,while making oneself as informed as possible about connections from other fields to this central field.Such cross-connections facilitate the development of novel perspectives by enabling one to integrate ideas and methods from various fields of knowledge and modes of exploration and expression.
Environment.A nurturing environment,inspirational,positively challenging,is deal.But such an ideal is not always a reality.People at times have to use the environment in creative ways if it is to function as an inspirational matrix for them.
Would Falola have achieved so much he had remained in Nigeria where he got his PhD? Its clear he has always been driven to publish and to publish books,as evident from his book publications from 1983,shortly after his PhD in 1981.His production of books accelerated in 1985 to the level of two books a year.What motivated that sharp jump? What factors enabled him to sustain that pace?
I also see that a significant part of his productivity is stimulated by the social context of scholarship,specifically conferences and co-writers and editors.Its clear that his creativity oscillates between individual gestation and production and the stimuli of social contexts and relationships.
It would be helpful to have a biography from such a person so that one can understand the psychological and intellectual motions and practical initiatives that have given birth to this kind of achievement.I see that he has one memoir A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt:An African Memoir described as having gained this list of distinctions: "Finalist: The Association of African Studies 2005 Melville J. Herskovits Award;Finalist: The Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) 2005 Cecil B. Curry Award;Winner: 2004 Association of Third World Studies (ATWS) President's Distinguished Leadership and Scholarship Award;Winner: West African Oral History Association's E.J. Alagoa Prize for the best book for 2003-2004;Runner-up: 9th Robert Hamilton Book Awards, University of Texas, Austin".
This memoir will be certainly intriguing to read and will form part of a Toyin Falola library,a section of one's library where one can follow the development of the work of a modern disciple of the North African Berber Ibn Khaldun,who,in the Maqqadimah,created what is described as the first work of global history,along with being a forerunner of the social sciences in general,anticipating a good number of its disciplines centuries before their Western formulation, a disciple of the Greek Thucydides,described as the father of history study and writing in the modern sense .
Thanks
Toyin Adepoju
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