This talk examines Wole Soyinka’s memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn as autofiction and auto-theory, examining three interrelated thematic modalities and aesthetic executions in the text: Soyinka’s narrative modelling of the social body as a sensorium of common feeling through formal narrative features; his use of an optative elegiac mode within a post-national circum-Atlantic world as a gesture of mourning and rearrangement; and his use of border dialogues to intimate emerging collectives and the global dimensions of the historical transformations affecting Nigeria.
About the speaker
Dr. Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi (Tunji) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He teaches postcolonial literature with an emphasis on literatures of Africa and the African diaspora, and his research interests include African and Black life writing, forms of the novel, cinema, African queer scholarship, travel writing, and Black transnationalisms & intellectual history. His research has appeared in Research in African Literatures, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
