Femi Osofisan. 2016. the Muse of Anomy: Essays on Literature and the Humanities in Nigeria

Abstract

Femi Osofisan. 2016. The Muse of Anomy: Essays on Literature and the Humanities in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. 297 pp. Nigerian literature has been haunted by the specter of identity politics in the last two decades. This crisis, materialized in the present desire of some writers to break free from Western gatekeepers and write for local audiences, is arguably best evident in the inability of scholars in the field to clearly delineate the imbrications of literary voices and temperaments across generations. For instance, some writers in Nigeria's so-called third-generation could easily fit into a contemporary epoch that boasts of writers such as Teju Cole, Chimamanda Adichie, and Lola Shoneyin producing authentic works that recall the poetics and styles of even much earlier generations dating back to Chinua Achebe. The reterritorialization of the literary imagination from (the University of) Ibadan to Freedom Park is a symptom to be probed, for it shows how a politics of space is mapped by the struggle between a romanticized cosmopolitanism of Ibadan and the emergent Afropolitan vibes from modern Lagos for a new literary identity for the country. Femi Osofisan's latest offering, The Muse of Anomy, is therefore a timely volume that facilitates that investigation as it eloquently frames the shift and continuities in Nigerian literary and cultural discourses through an intervention organized around storytelling and humor. Aside the brilliant juxtaposition of writers and generations as disparate as Amos Tutuola and Elnathan John, the book offers a rich melange of ideas that unsettles "an experience of life and history" defined by "unceasing anarchy" (p. 5). Beginning with an insightful, even if belabored, introduction, the text projects the critical musings of a Nigerian writer whose oeuvre, burdened with a neo-Marxist urgency, has been an essential articulation for the recentering of indigenous epistemologies, subaltern agency, and radical politics in Nigeria. In thirteen finely cathected chapters reproduced from several lectures and seminars, Osofisan charts the varied locations and relocations of Nigerian literature and performance traditions from the 1950s, with Ibadan positioned as the initial artistic hub from which a hermeneutic of cultural resistance and humanism was birthed in Nigerian literature. The author's reprobation of contemporary intellectual practice in Nigeria recalls the Gramscian notion of "organic intellectuals," describing scholars committed to winning the consent of the working-class to counter-hegemonic ideas and values. Precisely because of what Osofisan identifies as a parlous absence of such an intellectual body, committed to both a genuine intellectual culture and a radical commitment to knowledge and enquiry on behalf of non-dominant groups, he implicates Nigerian intellectuals in what he calls a tragic betrayal of the people. …