Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ (Humanities Distinguished Professor in the English and African American and African Studies, Ohio State University)

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the English and African American and African Studies departments at Ohio State University. He is the author of Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998) and The Slave’s Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature (2005). He has also authored numerous book chapters and journal articles. Some of the journals in which Dr. Adéẹ̀kọ́’s work has appeared are Transition, Research in African Literatures, Global South, Oral Tradition, and Critical Inquiry. He is co-editor of West Africa Review, associate editor of Research in African Literatures, and editorial review board member at African Studies Quarterly and English Language Notes. Dr. Adéẹ̀kọ́’s current research projects are on contemporary praise culture in Lagos, Nigeria, and animist poetics in African American poetry, 1773-1925.

Akin Adesokan (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington)

I am an African writer and scholar. My first novel, Roots in the Sky, was published 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, postcolonial intellectual history, nonfictional prose, and literary and cultural theory. As an African 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 figure 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 an essay on the cinema of the Malian/Mauritanian filmmaker, Abderrahmane Sissako, published in Screen, the journal of cinema, in 2010.

My new book, Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics (Indiana University Press, 2011), is a multi-disciplinary work which explores the generic and cultural consequences of globalization by focusing on some conceptual patterns in Nollywood, African cinema, and postcolonial writings.

Kunle Ajibade (Executive Editor, TheNews, Lagos, Nigeria)

Kunle Ajibade, based in Lagos, Nigeria, is Co-Founder/Publisher and Executive Editor of TheNEWS weekly magazine and P.M. NEWS, an evening daily. Both are part of the corporate Independent Communications Network Limited (ICNL), which he also co-founded. ICNL is one of Nigeria’s preeminent multi-media business outfits, dedicated to the promotion of the principles of civilized nationalism, democracy, political and economic pluralism, liberty and equality of the various ethnic groups of the Nigerian Federation.

Ajibade attended the University of Ife, where he earned a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Literature in English. He worked in Grant Advertising as a copywriter, and as accomplished journalist in African Concord (senior correspondent) and in the African Guardian (assistant editor). In 1995, he was jailed for life because of a story published in TheNEWS and was only released in 1998 when his jailer, the then Head of State General Sani Abacha, died. Ajibade won the 1998/1999 Feuchtwanger Fellowship to write his prison memoir, Jailed for Life: A Reporter's Prison Notes, which was published in February 2003 by Heinemann Educational Books (Nig.) Plc. The book won the first Victor Nwankwo Book of the Year Award instituted by the Nigerian Book Fair Trust. Beyond an account of his jail-time experience, it is also a revealing extended reflection on professional journalistic practice and integrity in unyielding authoritarian contexts. In 2008, his second book, What a Country! was published by BookCraft.

Florence Bernault (History, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Florence Bernault is a historian of equatorial Africa, and has written extensively on contemporary politics and culture in Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville. After a monograph on decolonization in Equatorial Africa, she edited a volume on the history of prisons in Africa, and another on the import of postcolonial studies in France. Her new book, Struggles for the Sacred: Witchcraft and Power in Gabon [in progress], seeks to explain why, at the twentieth century’s end, witchcraft constitutes one of the most powerful rhetorics of popular culture in central Africa, and how, in today’s postcolonial world, global notions of power remain grounded in carnal fetishism. Her work has been rewarded by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001.

Dr. Bernault's publications include Ruptures postcoloniales. Les nouveaux visages de la société (editor; Paris: La Découverte, 2010), A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (ed.; Portsmouth, NJ: Heinemann, 2003), Enferment, prison et châtiments en Afrique du XIXe siècle à nos jours (ed.; Paris: Karthala, 1999), and Démocraties ambigües en Afrique centrale: Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, 1940-1965 (Paris: Karthala, 1996). She served as guest editor for two special issues of the flagship journal Political Africaine, on the 2009 elections in Gabon, and another on Witchcraft and Power in Africa.

Matthew H. Brown (African Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Matthew H. Brown is a PhD candidate in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research includes work on African cinema, literature, and popular cultures. His dissertation historicizes and interprets the construction of key genres in the Nigerian video film industry, otherwise known as Nollywood. He has also published on Nigerian popular music and African film festivals. Brown is currently working with the Journal of African Cinemas to compile research on Nollywood’s audiences in locations across the African continent.

Patrick Chabal (History, King's College - London)

Patrick Chabal joined King’s College London in 1984 following a Research Fellowship in Cambridge, where he got his PhD. His earlier education was at Harvard University, where he got his BA and Columbia University, where he did a Masters in International Affairs. Both in the USA and in Britain he specialised in the modern history and politics of Africa and the study of comparative politics. He has been a Visiting Professor in Italy, France, Switzerland, India, Portugal and a visiting researcher in South Africa. He was invited to spend one year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2006-07. He is currently engaged in a long-term project combining the study of culture in comparative politics with an enquiry into the theory of the social sciences.

His books include The End of Conceit: Western Rationality after Postcolonialism (2012); Africa: the Politics of Suffering and Smiling (2009); Angola: the Weight of History (2008); Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning (2006); A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (2002); Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (1999); The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa (1996); Power in Africa (1992 & 1994); Vozes Moçambicanas: literatura e nacionalidade (1994) and Amílcar Cabral (1983 & 2002) – a number of which have been translated into other European languages.

Nevine El Nossery (French and Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Névine El Nossery is Assistant Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research and teaching interests include North African and French Canadian literature, migrant writing and exile, women’s testimonial writing, and Middle-Eastern literature and culture. She has co-edited a collection of essays, Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin. Enracinement et renégociation, published in 2011. She also published articles and book chapters on Malika Mokeddem, Assia Djebar, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Amin Maalouf and Nancy Huston. Presently, she is working on her first manuscript on women’s fictional testimonies in Algeria during the civil war.

Sarah Harrison (English, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Sarah Harrison a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with research interests in postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, urban studies, and theories of migration and diaspora. My dissertation examines how contemporary postcolonial writers identify opportunities for social and environmental justice through their particular engagement with the politics and aesthetics of “urban waste”—degraded spaces (slums, dumps, ghettos), devalued people (migrants, slum-dwellers, minorities) and discarded things (trash, garbage, remains).

Anne-Maria Makhulu (Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies, Duke University)

Anne-Maria Makhulu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her research interests cover: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, occult economies, neoliberalism, Marxism, anthropology of finance, as well as questions of aesthetics, including the literature and cinema of South Africa. Her book manuscript, currently under review, is entitled The Geography of Freedom: Cape Town in Transition (working title). The project examines the status and meaning of the South African city under apartheid and immediately after the transition to democracy focusing on the ways in which matters of citizenship, labor, and race critically intersected with the “urban,” and thereby came to constitute it as a strategic space in which marginal subjects, specifically, the black metropolitan poor, sought to make claims on the apartheid state. Makhulu is a contributor to Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (2004), New Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (2010), and “Ethics of Scale: Relocating Politics After Liberation” (2010). She is a co-editor of Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities (2010).

Luis Madureira (Spanish and Portuguese, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Madureira earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at San Diego, and his major areas of specialization include Luso-Brazilian colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as Modernism and Modernity in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean. He has written two books, Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone-African Literature: Narratives of Discovery and Empire (2007), which studies figurations of empire, nation and revolution in Portuguese and Lusophone African literatures, and Cannibal Modernities (2005), a reexamination of the Brazilian and Caribbean avant-gardes from a postcolonial perspective. He has published several articles on topics ranging from Luso-Brazilian literature and cinema to early modern travel narratives and postcolonial theory. His current research focuses on Mozambican theatre and the politics of time in contemporary Lusophone fiction.

Louise Meintjes (Music and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University)

Louise Meintjes is associate professor of music and cultural anthropology at Duke University and author of Sound of Africa! Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio (Duke University Press, 2003). She is working on an ethnography which situates Zulu ngoma song and dance in post-apartheid South Africa.

John Nimis (French and Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison

John Nimis received his PhD in French from New York University in 2010. His main research interest is the literature and music of Central Africa, with a focus on the Lingala language and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He is working on his first book, tentatively titled Precarious Mastery: Literary Listening, Congolese Music and the African Imagination, which brings literary techniques to the study of music, and applies musical analysis to the study of African literature. He has taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and was a visiting researcher at the WISER research center in Johannesburg, South Africa. His secondary research interests include anglophone and lusophone Africa, the francophone Caribbean, and 19th century Europe.

Nmachika Nwokeabia (English, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Nmachika Nwokeabia is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests include Anglophone African and Postcolonial Literatures, African feminisms, book history and print culture, environmentalism, and studies of sexuality. She is currently writing a dissertation on 21st century Nigerian novels.

Tejumola Olaniyan (English/African Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Tejumola Olaniyan, IRH Senior Fellow, is the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Languages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is founding chair of the African Diaspora and the Atlantic World Research Circle (2003-2010), and currently co-chairs the Music, Race, and Empire Research Circle. His research interests include African, African diaspora, and postcolonial literature and cultural studies. He has published widely in these areas, including Arrest the Music!: Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (2004, 2009; nominated for Best Research in World Music by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections in 2005), Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama (1995), and co-editor of African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory (2007, with Ato Quayson), African Drama and Performance (2004, with John Conteh-Morgan), and African Diaspora and the Disciplines (2010, with James H. Sweet). One of his current projects is a book, Political Cartooning in Africa, forthcoming from Indiana University Press, and an online encyclopedia of African political cartoonists.

Niyi Osundare (English, University of New Orleans)

Nigerian poet, playwright, essayist, and professor of English; has authored over 15 books of poetry, two books of selected poems, four plays, two books of essays, and numerous scholarly articles and reviews. Among his many prizes are the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize, the Cadbury/ANA Poetry Prize (which he won on two occasions), the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Noma Award (Africa's most prestigious Book Award), the Tchicaya U Tam’si Award for African Poetry (generally regarded as “Africa’s highest poetry prize”), and the Fonlon/Nichols Award for "excellence in literary creativity combined with significant contributions to Human Rights in Africa." In 2004, his award-winning book, The Eye of the Earth, was selected as One of Nigeria’s Best 25 Books in the Past 25 Years by Spectrum Books. He has been recipient of honorary doctorates from l'Universite de Toulouse-Le Mirail in France and Franklin Pierce University, Rindge, USA. A leading figure in the vanguard for the popularization of written poetry in Nigeria, he maintains a weekly poetry column in Nigeria's Sunday Tribune, and is a frequent contributor to the media on cultural and social matters. He is also a guest columnist for Newswatch, a prominent Nigerian newsmagazine, and an active contributor to public discourse on radio and television. A believer in poetry-as-performance, he has performed his works in many parts of the world, and his poetry has been translated into many languages across the world. A fervent campaigner for Human Rights, social justice, and the environment, he was professor and former Chair of English at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and he is currently Distinguished Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, USA, and constantly in touch with Nigeria, his social and cultural base.

Patrick William Otim (History, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Patrick William Otim is a second year PhD student in African History. Otim holds a masters degree in conflict and peace studies from University of Notre Dame, a post-graduate diploma in conflict studies and a post-graduate diploma in education from Gulu University, and BA in humanities from Makerere University. Before joining University of Notre Dame in 2008, Otim worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council as a communication, monitoring and evaluation manager. His current research areas include: development of the early mission-educated elite in Acholiland, pre-colonial and colonial violence as well as transitional justice.

Lark Porter (French and Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Lark Porter is a PhD student in the French and Italian Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She completed her undergraduate education in French Studies at Brigham Young University in 2007 and earned a Masters in French literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. Her research interests include Francophone African literatures and the 19th century French novel. Lark's African emphasis currently focuses on the writings Aminata Sow Fall, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, and Alain Mabanckou and their treatment of the history of colonialism, slavery, and the African diaspora. Other interests include: the presence of painting, drawing, and photography in African texts; the act of artistic creation in literature; the manifestation and cultural significance of color in text; the exploitation of Senegalese talibés, and its portrayal in Senegalese literature and current events; religion and its influence in French and African literatures; the conditions of women and their literary production, and World War II and the Holocaust.

Ato Quayson (English, Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto)

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. Prof. Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory. His publications include Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration, ed. (Oxford: Ayebia Publishers, 2008), Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia UP, 2007), African Literature: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (with Tejumola Olaniyan; Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2003), Relocating Postcolonialism (with David Theo Goldberg; Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), and Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana UP, 1997). Dr. Quayson also wrote the Introduction and Notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Nelson Mandela’s No Easy Walk to Freedom (London: Penguin, 2002). Most recently, he edited the two-volume collection, The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge UP, 2012).

Sofia Samatar(African Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Sofia Samatar is a PhD student in the Department of African Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests include Egyptian and Sudanese fiction, Arabic folk epics, world literature, magical realism and translation studies. She is currently writing a dissertation on the novels of Tayeb Salih.

Michael Schatzberg (Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

His major teaching and research interests are in African politics, comparative politics, political culture, and qualitative methodology. His books include Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: Father, Family, Food (Indiana University Press, 2001), The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire (Indiana University Press, 1988), Politics and Class In Zaire: Bureaucracy, Business and Beer in Lisala (Holmes & Meier, Africana, 1980), and Mobutu or Chaos? The United States and Zaire, 1960-1990 (Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1991). He has also published articles in Politique africaine, Journal of Democracy, Africa, Comparative Politics, Journal of Modern African Studies, Afrika Spectrum and other professional journals. He is working on a research project that deals with the politics, economics, and culture of football (soccer) in sub-Saharan Africa.

Aliko Songolo (French and Italian/African Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Aliko Songolo is Halverson-Bascom Professor of French and Professor of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching interests lie primarily in Francophone literatures of Africa and the Caribbean, and Francophone cinemas of Africa and Québec. He has published a monograph (Aimé Césaire: une poétique de la découverte, 1985), two co-edited volumes (Twenty-five Years After Dakar and Fourah Bay: The Growth of African Literature, 1998, and Atlantic Cross-Currents/Transatlantiques, 2001), and was Associate Editor of the highly acclaimed five-volume New Encyclopedia of Africa (2008). He also edited special issues of two eminent journals in his field, French Review (1982) and Présence Francophone (2003), and published numerous articles. His current research projects investigate the question of national cinema in Québec and Francophone Africa, and postcoloniality in the wake of the Négritude movement. He was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Knight in the Order of Academic Palms) by the French Ministry of National Education in 2008. He has served as Chair of the Department of French & Italian, as Director of the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and as Associate Vice-Chancellor of Academic Affairs at the University of California-Irvine before his move to Wisconsin.

James Sweet (History, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

My research and teaching interests center on Africans and their descendants in the broader world. I teach courses on comparative slavery, race and nation in the Atlantic world, comparative world history, the history of Brazil, and the history of South Africa. To date, my research has concentrated on the social and cultural histories of Africans in the Atlantic world. My next project will focus on the international dimensions of slavery in the United States. I have also begun several research projects related to South Africa.

Olúfémi Táíwò (Philosophy and Global African Studies, Seattle University)

Olúfémi Táíwò was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and graduate degrees from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. He taught at the Obafemi Awolowo University until 1990. He served as a Staff Development Fellow, under the Canada-Nigeria Linkage Programme in Women’s Studies, at the Institute for the Study of Women, Mount Saint Vincent University, and the Centre for International Studies, Dalhousie University, both in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, from 1988 to 1989.

Since moving to the United States, he has taught at Loyola University, Chicago. He was a Rockefeller Postdoctoral Fellow at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University in 1990/1991. In the 2000/2001 academic year, he was a Ford Foundation Visiting Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S.A. He has been a Visiting Distinguished Minority Scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, U.S.A. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at the Institut für Afrikastudien, Universität Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany; Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea; and the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica.

His original research was devoted to developing a different account of the relationship between Marxism and law. He has continued to do work devoted to the challenges of post-legal society and the utopian possibilities such a society contains. In recent years, he has been concerned to reinscribe the contributions of Africans in the philosophical discourse of modernity, especially in its political aspects. The book that he is currently working on looks at modern African political philosophy from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. A third element of his ongoing work is devoted to topics in African philosophy beyond those identified in social and political philosophy. He has ongoing research in the philosophy of religion, ethics, and the question of whether or not we can do sociology in an African idiom, specifically Yorùbá language. His ultimate aim is to write a major book on Yorùbá philosophy.

He is the author of Legal Naturalism: A Marxist Theory of Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) [currently being translated into Chinese], How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010) and Africa Must Be Modern: a Manifesto (Ibadan: Bookcraft, 2011) [in press].

Helen Tilley (History of Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Helen Tilley studies the history of environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological research in colonial and post-colonial Africa, emphasizing in particular intersections with environmental history, global health, world history, and development studies. Her first book, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950, appeared with University of Chicago Press in 2011. She has also edited, with anthropologist Robert Gordon, Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 2007). Another co-edited volume appeared with Princeton University Press in 2010: Utopia/Dystopia: Historical Conditions of Possibility. In the introduction to that book, Tilley introduced the idea of anima as way to analyze utopian and visionary projects.

Ken Walibora Waliaula (African Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Ken Walibora Waliaula is an Assistant Professor in the African Languages and Literature Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests cover African continental and diasporic literatures, with a focus on Anglophone and Swahiliphone fiction. His monograph Narrating Prison Experience is forthcoming from Ohio University Press. He is part of a collaborative research venture examining the various translations of Ferdinard Oyono’s African classic Houseboy. He has published a number book of chapters and articles in academic journals including, Du negre Bambara au Negropolitan, Research in African Literatures (RAL), and Journal of the Association of African Literature (JALA), and Journal of African Language Teachers Association (JALTA). Additionally, Waliaula is a prolific Kiswahili fiction writer and poet with a literary oeuvre exceeding thirty titles and has won several awards. For instance, he won the Jomo Kenyatta Literature Prize twice with his Swahili texts, Ndoto ya Amerika in 2003 and Kisasi Hapana in 2009, respectively.

M. Crawford Young (Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

M. Crawford Young is Rupert Emerson and H. Edwin Young Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he taught from 1963 till retirement in 2001. He also taught in Uganda, Congo-Kinshasa and Senegal. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1953 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1964. Some of his major books include Politics in the Congo: Decolonization and Independence (1965); The Politics of Cultural Pluralism (1976), awarded the Herskovits Prize by the African Studies Association; Ideology and Development in Africa (1982); The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (with Thomas Turner, 1985); and The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (1994), which won the Lubbert Prize from the American Political Science Association as the best book written that year in the field of Comparative Politics. Young’s new book, The Post-Colonial State in Africa: A Half Century of Independence 1960-2010, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press in 2012. Young was President of the African Studies Association in 1983 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.