Interviewer
Guest
Ato Quayson
is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has been since August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in Sept 1995 to become a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies He was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar from 1991-994 and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. In 2004 he held a Fellowship at the Du Bois Institute for African-American Studies at Harvard University. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and has lectured widely in places such as Istanbul, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, Bergen, and on many campuses in the US, the UK, and in Europe more generally. Prof Quayson is the Chief Examiner in English for the International Baccalaureate and sits on the Commissioning Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom as well as on various other academic bodies and organisations. He was elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in December 2005.
Prof Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory. His publications include:
Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997)
Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000)
(with David Theo Goldberg) Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)
Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minnesota University Press, 2003)
Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia University Press, 2007)
(with Tejumola Olaniyan) African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007)
He also wrote the Introduction and Notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Nelson Mandela's, No Easy Walk to Freedom (2002).
Respondents
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
is Professor and Head, Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has published scores of essays and has authored or edited more than a dozen books, including most recently:
Rethinking Africa's Globalization (2003)
the Routledge Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century African History ,
Leisure in Urban Africa (2003),
Science and Technology in Africa (2003),
African Universities in the Twentieth Century, Vols 1 & 2 (2004), and
The Study of Africa Vols 1 & 2 (2006).
He is the winner of the 1994 Noma Award for his book A Modern Economic History of Africa (1993) and the 1998 Special Commendation of the Noma Award for Manufacturing African Crises (1997). He has also published works of fiction. He runs the popular internet site, The Zeleza Post (www.zeleza.com), an authoritative space for informed commentary on Africa and the pan-African world.
Olakunle George
is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies and Director of the Honors Program, Department of English at Brown University. He took his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1992. His research interests include African literature, postcolonial studies, literary and cultural theory. George has held a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and authored a book titled Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters (State University of New York Press, 2003). His articles have appeared in Comparative Literature; Diacritics; Novel: A Forum on Fiction; Research in African Literatures; and Representations. His current book project is entitled Pagans and Patriots: Conversion and the Text of Africa. .