We are very sad to share that Biodun Jeyifo, Emeritus Research Professor of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature, passed away on February 11. Professor Jeyifo was a leading literary critic and cultural theorist who attained great prominence in African intellectual circles for his analysis of modernity and its attendant social and cultural crises. Editor of the authoritative anthology, Modern African Drama (Norton Critical Editions, 2002), Jeyifo’s work has long framed scholarship in African drama and theater. His 1984 study of the Yoruba Popular Traveling Theatre is viewed by many as seminal in the study of African drama.

Jeyifo’s early essays single-handedly shaped critical discourse on dramatic works by Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature and a fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African-American Research. His three subsequent books extending the scope of these essays have established him as a top interpreter of Soyinka. His most recent book, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), weighing Soyinka’s vast and complex body of work, is arguably the most sophisticated analysis of any single author in African literature.

Jeyifo has also turned his attention to Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, writing a series of essays in the early 1990s that placed Achebe’s work, including Things Fall Apart, in an ideological and theoretical perspective not previously considered by other critics.

Research Focus

• African and Caribbean ‘Anglophone’ literatures
• Theatrical theory and dramatic literature, Western and non-Western
• Comparative African and Afro-American critical thought
• Marxist literary and cultural theory
• Colonial and postcolonial studies
• Twentieth-century revolutionary social philosophy and literature

Source

A Mind at Full Stretch: Remembering Bíọ́dún Jéyǐfó – Olongo Africa