Welcome to the inaugural edition of The PONAL Quarterly Forum. PQF is a platform for brainstorming on current developments and topical issues in African Studies. Although literature is PONAL’s primary point of imbrication into the field, PQF will engage African Studies from an interdisciplinary, and therefore richer, overarching perspective, which will take cognizance of the complex history of beginnings, discursive trajectories, and disciplinary inflections within different contexts, local and global.

This issue of PQF reflects this broad and complex approach as evidenced by Pius Adesanmi’s nuanced and probing questions, and by Ato Quayson’s magisterial and compelling answers, his elaborate mapping of the genealogy of ‘Africa’ as a subject of interdisciplinary observation within Western and African academe. Ato explores the intersections of African and Diaspora Studies in terms of pedagogical possibilities and limitations with characteristic brio. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza’s response to the discussion between Ato and Pius amplifies the former’s comments, and targets that part of the dialogue focusing on African Studies as an historical phenomenon with complex and globalized trajectories in contexts ranging from China to Japan, Russia to Scandinavia. Olakunle George concentrates on the aspect of the debate which highlights the necessary interface between literature and what Ato has famously theorized as “the social” as they are, or should be, empowered by literary criticism, eschewing New Criticism’s tendency to divorce text from context.

As Paul notes in his response, PQF has adopted a house style that mixes serious business and what Charles Ogu, maverick Nigerian film script writer, likes to call “high-tension discourse” with conviviality, familiarity, friendliness, and fraternity, all characteristics of the African village playground, the ilo of the Igbo world that Chinua Achebe’s novels have felicitously made famous. This explains our recourse to first names and the use of some photos of our guest in relaxation mode. With a bottle of beer in hand or a glass of orange juice as appropriate, we hope that the reader will enter into the collegial and convivial world of PQF and take an enjoyable trip with our inaugural guest and the respondents: Ato, Paul, and Kunle.