ALA Lecture Series, 2020-2021: Ato Quayson

Описание: Introduction by Akin Adesokan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University

Good morning everyone across the Zoomdom and around the world! Welcome to the inaugural talk in the African Literature Association’s Lecture Series, to be given by Professor Ato Quayson. Before going to introduce the speaker, I’ll say a few quick words about the lecture series, which the current Executive Council of the association has put in motion, to engage publicly its members' interest and to generate even more interest among others, and thus make them join us! So to our steady members, thank you for your long-standing and continuing dedication, and to those who are just getting interested in the association, we hope that your curiosity will be rewarded with these lectures and that you will in turn reward the association with your sustained attention!

Join the ALA here: https://africanlit.org/membership/

Ato Quayson is Professor of English at Stanford University and a leading scholar of African and postcolonial literatures. Prior to joining Stanford, Ato taught at New York University and at the University of Toronto where he directed the Center for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. He is the author of many monographs, and co-editor of several other volumes, including Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, Calibrations, Aesthetic Nervousness, Oxford Street, Accra, and editor of the Cambridge journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Ato has used his COVID-19-imposed restriction to start a regular YouTube videocast. In these videos, he has focused mostly on tragedy, and he is currently working on a monograph on that topic that will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Quayson's Channel:    / @criticreadingwriting  

At some point when Ato and I were communicating about the format and content of this lecture, I joked that early morning (for us here in the US, that is) on any day would be an interesting time to speak about such a heavy subject as tragedy, though it be in the form of literary representation. Indeed, if you look around, you might just realize that there is hardly a better time than now, and there’s certainly a good chance that we have fun at it, without being irresponsibly ironic.

Over, then, to Ato, whose lecture is titled “Tragedy and African Literature: Concepts and Representations.”