‘Gbenga Adeoba is PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature and Thought. His research focuses on the literatures and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, with special interests in poetry and visual cultures.
Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and professor of English and African and African American studies at Stanford. He is the author of six monographs and 10 (co)edited volumes in areas including African literature, literary criticism and theory, urban studies and disability studies. In his public-facing work, Quayson espouses the continued relevance of the humanities. He curates Critic.Reading.Writing, a YouTube channel on which he discusses a variety of books and films and how we read literature. Recently, he visited WashU as part of the Comparative Humanities Lecture Series organized by the Global Comparative Humanities Working Group. He talked with comparative literature PhD student ‘Gbenga Adeoba about his works-in-progress, modes of public scholarship and the beginnings of comparatism in Africa. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your forthcoming book, Accra Chic: A Locational History of Fashion in Accra (with Grace Toleque), tracks the interplay between traditional motifs and transnational trends in Accra’s fashion worlds. How would you describe the book’s relationship to your other works and areas of interest?
The book Accra Chic has a direct relationship to Oxford Street, Accra, and it derives from my interest in urban studies. But the focus this time is on fashion and fashion sustainability — the last bit developed later. I enjoyed doing the research for Oxford Street, Accra so much that I had to force myself to stop. Accra Chic goes back to areas that I didn’t touch on. Fashion is also an area of interest to my collaborator, who happens to be my wife. She is a fashion designer and has a clothing line.
The secondhand cloth market (Kantamanto) we are exploring on fashion sustainability issues is fascinating. Millions of clothing items arrive about every week. These are sifted, categorized and distributed across Ghana and West Africa. But the problem is that about 60% of the clothes are complete junk. The West has an enormous amount of outgoing secondhand clothes, and they send them out because they don’t know how to dispose of them. So, they send them to places like Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Rwanda and so on, where the clothes generate waste disposal problems. Many of the fabrics are non-biodegradable.
The forthcoming book is a coauthored work that broadens the view of your collaborative praxis — evident in many of your edited volumes, including the most recent one co-edited with Ankhi Murkejee. Can you comment briefly on your experience as well as the possibilities and rewards collaborative modes of knowledge production — interdisciplinary or not — can afford humanities research?
I’ve collaborated variously. As a general rule, the first principle of collaboration is that the collaborators have to be like-minded. It is thus easier to collaborate with your friends. You must have an understanding and mutual respect with the collaborator(s). One of the most fruitful collaborations I’ve had was with my dear friend, the late Tejumola Olaniyan. We were going to work on two books: African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory and a book on the theory of African literature. We started but never finished the latter. Some other collaborations have been instruments of mentoring younger scholars into this particular kind of intellectual life. Such a collaboration would apply to A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism. My collaborator, Girish Daswani, was then an assistant professor at the University of Toronto.
In the sciences, collaboration is normal. It is not so straightforward in the arts and humanities because we have difficulties attributing original ideas. There is a demand for specification. But as you well know, ideas merge as you discuss something with someone. Even if you made the first point, it’s very difficult to separate by the time it becomes a fully formed idea. The shape it took after several iterations is no longer yours. But they will ask you, in the humanities, to specify. We still haven’t got it yet. But I think that more and more, there ought to be different levels of collaboration in the humanities on large-scale projects like books and co-edited books, co-written articles and collaborative teaching. Collaboration will be good to expand our pedagogy.
Part of Ato Quayson’s effort to reach wider audiences includes his YouTube channel, Critic.Reading.Writing, with which he shares his ideas how we read literature, drawing on art, film, history and philosophy from a wide range of literary traditions.
Increasing interests in public-facing work urge attention to the long history of engaged scholarship in postcolonial and minority contexts. How might you appraise that long history? What lessons can we draw for the present?
I start with myself. I’m always on the radio when I go to Ghana. I am asked to comment on various things. And in Africa, at least from where we come, a scholar is assumed to have valuable opinions on the rest of the world, and they are received as such. Take, for example, my senior Nigerian colleagues like Biodun Jeyifo. Jeyifo is like a giant. He can open his mouth and talk about politics. People take him seriously. He will be published; he has views. Now, Jeyifo in America has to be quiet because he is not an authority on African American life. But he may be able to talk about Africans in the United States. So, the public-facing also depends on your audience. I think that, increasingly, postcolonial scholars need to have more public-facing work but for different publics. We need to diversify our audience.
Let’s talk about Black public-facing work. People like Cornel West, Houston Baker Jr. and, a little bit, Henry Louis Gates Jr., have been very influential in impacting cultural modes or cultural understanding in this country. When Cornel West opens his mouth, Black people pay attention. They discuss his views in churches, for example. This also brings me to the different associational groupings that have determined African American life, the engines of cultural understanding or self-understanding. The church is a good example. The Black church has been a major engine of cultural understanding, politicization and consciousness building.
The church in Africa could also be an engine of consciousness-raising, not just with respect to religious matters but also cultural ones — which has happened in this country. The tradition of the spirituals or the blues: All of these came from churches. In Africa, our associational nodes are disparate. They are dispersed. Our churches, for example, will not pick up something that Biodun Jeyifo says about culture. So, yes, there are lessons to be drawn from public intellectuals and associational life in America. There’s no doubt about it.
The other thing — sometimes, not always — in Africa is ethnic fragmentation. In Nigeria, for example, a Northern public intellectual will feel obliged to speak only to the North as a way of guaranteeing an audience when, in fact, their platform ought to be all of Nigeria. It is the same way with a Southern public intellectual. Sometimes, ethnic fragmentation gets in the way because we imagine our audiences to be narrower than they really are. I think that's also potentially a drawback.
Your work on comparative postcolonialisms attends partly to questions of comparison in world literature. Beyond the institutional sense of comparative literature, can you comment on the beginnings of comparatism in Africa?
In a way, comparatism in Africa starts from the very moment of the colonial encounter, and that is because Africans have always had to translate into different orders of comprehensibility that require us to think in multiple ways all the time or at the same time. The African comparatism then proceeds with the establishment of colonial epistemologies. Our people always had to translate between their gods and foreign gods; it was not unusual for them to go to church but also to pour libation or make food offerings to their deities. All this was a form of translation, and it had a psychic toll.
Comparatism in Africa starts from the very moment of the colonial encounter, and that is because Africans have always had to translate into different orders of comprehensibility that require us to think in multiple ways all the time or at the same time.
A good example is represented in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. Ezeulu, the priest of Ulu, says that he serves only Ulu, but it doesn’t prevent him from sending his son to the Christian school. Ezeulu is also a savvy historical figure. He’s an interpreter of history. He tells his son, “Go, and if they have brought something, bring my share to me.” What he really means is that “these people are a world historical reality, and even though I’m sworn to Ulu, I need to understand this world historical moment and interpret it.” He is interested in the Christians and Christian education, so he sent his son. But he somehow ignores the fact of colonialism itself. He separates colonialism from colonial education.
As we see it in the person of Ezeulu, the colonialism-informed mode of comparatism was complicated by the fact that this requirement to translate between our traditional values and other values sometimes created a kind of cognitive disorder. It is a cognitive disorder because we understood some things and completely misunderstood the most potent things. And what Achebe does and captures very beautifully is actually replicated on a larger scale, in real history and time. So we were comparatists, not entirely of our own making and choice. There was a necessary comparatism of having to translate between cultures, and then there was a comparison imposed by colonial epistemological templates. That’s where it starts. And then there is comp lit. Comp lit is late to the game. That’s how I would answer it.
