Akin Adesokan
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Education
Ph.D. Cornell University, 2005
(812) 855-7935
Ballantine Hall 906
adesokan 
indiana.edu
I am an African scholar and writer. My first novel, Roots in the Sky, came out in 2004. My research interests are in twentieth- and twenty-first century African and African American/African Diaspora literatures and cultures, global postcoloniality, African cinema and contemporary global cinemas, nonfictional prose, and literary and cultural theory. As an African writer and scholar living in the wake of decolonization, and developing political and intellectual consciousness in the context of the demise of Soviet communism and apartheid rule in southern Africa, I am interested in the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of intellectual work. This interest, I might add, has been deepened by my earlier career as a journalist under military dictatorship in Nigeria, when a means of livelihood doubled as a means of self-expression in an aesthetically satisfying but politically risky sense. Now living and working in postnational United States as an expatriated African, I engage in research, teaching, and writing diversely preoccupied with “the poetics of engaged expatriation”. This is the development of a style suited to the apprehension of an intellectual or social type whose publics are present but scattered, whose subject is visible in its density, simultaneously resisting and courting representation because s/he does not simply inhabit the primary context of that work. I have attempted a preliminary exploration of this “poetics” in a paper on the cinema of the Malian/Mauritanian filmmaker, Abderrahmane Sissako.
For my collaboration with Indiana University's Black Film/Camera Archive, see the link below:
http://www.indiana.edu/~bfca/events/nigerianfilmseries.shtml
My current project is a book-in-progress, The Crossroads of Capital, a multi-disciplinary work which explores the generic and cultural consequences of the crisis of the nation-state through study of Nollywood, African cinema and postcolonial writings. Recent publications include:
“The Challenges of Aesthetic Populism: An Interview with Jean-Pierre Bekolo”, Postcolonial Text, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2008);
“The Significance of Ousmane Sembène”, World Literature Today, Vol. 82, No. 1, January-February, 2008;