Institute of African American Affairs14A Washington Mews, 4th FloorNew York, NY 10003

The Institute of African American Affairs (IAAA) at New York University was founded in 1969 to research, document, and celebrate the cultural and intellectual production of Africa and its diaspora in the Atlantic world and beyond. IAAA is committed to the study of Blacks in modernity through concentrations in Pan-Africanism and Black Urban Studies.

The NYU-IAAA Wole Soyinka Scholar-in-Residence programs are free and open to the public. Space is limited. Please RSVP at (212) 998-IAAA (4222). For updates and information please visit: nyuiaaa.org

“The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.” — Wole Soyinka

The breadth of excellence across the Tisch School of the Arts is unique and world-renowned. Artists and scholars from around the world earn BA, BFA, MA, MFA, MPS or PhD degrees in acting, arts politics, dance, design, performance, film, animation, writing for musical theatre, stage, screen & television, preservation, recorded music, photography, interactive media, and games. Visit tisch.nyu.edu for more.

Co-sponsored with Institute of African American Affairs presents

Wole SoyinkaScholar-in-Residence | Fall 2016

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Co-sponsored with

Institute of African American Affairs presents

Wole SoyinkaThe Artist:Scholar-in-Residence | Fall 2016

Nobel Laureate for Literature 1986, Wole Soyinka has published more than thirty works, and remains active on various international artistic and Human Rights organizations. Born and educated in Nigeria, Wole Soyinka continued his studies at the University of Leeds, England, then joined the Royal Court Theatre, London as a play-reader. In 1960, he returned to Nigeria, where he founded two theatre companies – The 1960 Masks, and the Orisun Theatre. Soyinka writes in various genres – from the light comedy of cultures in The Lion and the Jewel, the JERO Plays etc., through King Baabu, a savagely satiric adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, to the dense poetic tragedy of Death and the King’s Horseman.

Soyinka has also written novels and autobiographical works. AKE: The Years of Childhood has been described as a “classic of childhood biography anywhere”, while his latest, You Must Set Forth at Dawn was acclaimed one of the best non-fiction works of 2006. Literary and thematic essay collections include his 2004 BBC Reith Lectures, Climate of Fear, and OF AFRICA (2013) while his last collection of poems appeared as SAMARKAND and Other Markets I Have Known. Wole Soyinka lectures extensively and has held several university positions. He is currently Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature, Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria, Fellow of the Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada, and a Hutchins Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge.

MONDAY | OCTOBER 3RD, 2016 | 6:00 PM

WOLE SOYINKA MAIN LECTURE“Negritude By Any Other Name”As Scholar-in-Residence at the Institute of African American Affairs, New York University, Wole Soyinka will reflect on the themes of the world in Africa and Africa in the world, which would include, but not be limited to, the voices of African public intellectuals, at home and abroad, in assessing such issues as human rights, terrorism, religious absolutism, and the devastating consequences they are bringing on the world today. Also part of the discussion are the ways in which the global African South has been widely ignored by the West in the West’s attempt to resolve such issues as current refugee crises, terrorism and corruption. Topics will explore the roles of public intellectuals in proposing creative and positive approaches to such world problems. From this perspective what roles do African voices and African arts play in the world today? How could African voices and arts help to change the way Africa is perceived in the world and how

Africans perceive the injustices of the world visited upon them? Wole Soyinka will be introduced by Awam Amkpa, NYU Professor, Drama, Tisch School of the Arts.

LOCATION: NYU Law School, Vanderbilt Hall Tishman Auditorium, 1st floor 40 Washington Square South New York, NY

TUESDAY | OCTOBER 4TH, 2016 | 6:30 PM Film screening: NEGRITUDE: A DIALOGUE BETWEEN WOLE SOYINKA AND SENGHOR Directed by Manthia Diawara (52 mins.,France/USA/Germany/Portugal,2015)

This imagined dialogue between Léopold Sédar Senghor, one of the founding fathers of Negritude, and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, probes the relevance of the concept of Negritude, against the views of

its many critics, not only to the decolonization and independence movements of the 1950s and 1960s, but also to an understanding of the contemporary artistic and political scenes of nationalism, religious intolerance, multiculturalism, the exodus of Africans and other populations from the South, and xenophobic immigration policies in the West.

After the film join Wole Soyinka, director Manthia Diawara and NYU history Professor Frederick Cooper for a brief discussion and Q&A.

LOCATION: NYU Law School, Vanderbilt Hall Tishman Auditorium, 1st floor 40 Washington Square South New York, NY

FRIDAY | OCTOBER 7TH, 2016 | 6:30 PMWOLE SOYINKA IN CONVERSATION WITH TAIYE SELASIWole Soyinka and author/photographer Taiye Selasi discuss identity and creativity at home and abroad. To what extent were the intellectuals of previous generations subjected to the “cult of authenticity” that

contemporary diasporic artists now face? Does gender play any role? Where does the African artist fit into the broader African and African diasporic contexts today?

LOCATION: NYU Law School, Vanderbilt Hall Tishman Auditorium, 1st floor 40 Washington Square South New York, NY

The Programs:

Léopold Sédar Senghor and Wole Soyinka

Frederick Cooper

Manthia Diawara

Taiye Selasi

Awam Amkpa is a dramatist, documentary filmmaker, scholar of theatre and film and a curator of art and cultural practices. He is Associate Professor of Drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis in NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences. His work includes co-founder and co-curator of the annual Real Life Pan-African Documentary Film Festival in Accra, Ghana; curating the photographic exhibitions “Africa: See You, See Me” and co-curator of “They Won’t Budge: Africans in Europe”; and director of the documentary films The Other Day We Went to the Movies, A Very Very Short Story of Nollywood among others. Mentored byWole Soyinka, Professor Amkpa has a PhD in Drama from Bristol University, UK.

Frederick Cooper is Professor of History at New York University and a specialist in the history of Africa, empires, and decolonization. He is the author most recently of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (California, 2005), Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (with Jane Burbank, Princeton, 2010), Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton, 2014) and Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Harvard, 2014).

Manthia Diawara is a Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, Director of the Institute of African American Affairs at New York University, and also a Professor of Comparative Literature. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World (Basic Civitas Books, 2003), Black-American Cinema: Aesthetics and Spectatorship (ed. Routledge, 1993), African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1992), and In Search of Africa (Harvard University Press, 1998). He has published widely on the topic of film and literature of the Black Diaspora. Professor Diawara also collaborated with Ngûgî wa Thiong’o in making the documentary Sembene Ousmane: The Making of the African Cinema, and directed the German-produced documentary Rouch in Reverse. Two of his most recent films are Negritude: A Dialogue Between Wole Soyinka and Senghor (2015) and Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation (2010).

Awam Amkpa

Manthia Diawara

Frederick Cooper

The Participants:

Taiye Selasi is an author and photographer. Born in London and raised in Boston, she holds a BA in American Studies from Yale and an MPhil in International Relations from Oxford. In 2005 she published the seminal essay “Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)”, sparking a movement among young transnational Africans. In 2013 Selasi’s debut novel, the New York Times bestseller Ghana Must Go, was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013 by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. The same year Selasi was named to Granta’s once-in-a-decade list of Best Young British Novelists. Her 2015 TED talk, “Don’t Ask Where I’m From; Ask Where I’m a Local”, has reached over a million viewers, redefining the way a global society conceives of personal identity.

Taiye Selasi

The NYU-IAAA Wole Soyinka

Scholar-in-Residence programs are free

and open to the public.

For updates and information please visit: www.nyuiaaa.org

Space is limited.

Please RSVP at (212) 998-IAAA (4222)

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