Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics covers the major issues in Yorùbá history and politics, offering through narratives of the past and present a solid understanding of one of the most popular ethnic groups in Africa. Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics covers the major issues on Yorùbá history and politics, thus offering a solid understanding of one of the most popular ethnic groups in Africa. With a careful blend of sources and methods, narratives on the past and present, the book manages to present a long history as the backdrop to complicated contemporary politics. Contributors: Tunde M. Akinwumi, Olufunke A. Adeboye, R. T. Akinyele, Aribidesi Usman, Tunde Oduwobi, Olufemi Vaughan, Abolade Adeniji, Jean-Luc Martineau, Ann O'Hear, Rasheed Olaniyi, Charles Temitope Adeyanju, Julius O. Adekunle, Funso Afolayan, Olayiwola Abegunrin. Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Ann Genova is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

A rich and accessible account of Yoruba history, society and culture from the pre-colonial period to the present.

This is a book on the social and cultural history of Yoruba people, a people in southwest Nigeria. As the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of Yoruba dress in historical perspective, this book is an important contribution to African history in general and the Yoruba cultural history in particular. The book illuminates the impact of Christianity, Islam, and British colonialism on the construction of Yoruba identity, and how dress was entangled in that construction. It also provides insightful discussions of the transformations in dress culture since independence and demonstrates the importance of dress as a site for contesting and articulating postcolonial Yoruba identity and class structure within the Nigerian national space. This book provides many insights into these issues and is thus an invaluable addition to Africana studies, anthropology, and history.

Yoruba artists have long employed the visual arts to criticize dictatorial and ineffectual governments. This book examines satires of power in Yoruba visual culture from the precolonial to the postcolonial periods of Nigerian history. Prior to the imposition of British colonial rule between 1893 and 1960, there were manifestations of parodies of power in the Yoruba satirical masking as well as in the carvings of some of the leading artists of the era, including the renowned Olowe of Ise, who worked predominantly for many kings in southwestern Nigeria. By the 1940s, Yoruba artists began to use the Western modernist media of editorial cartooning and photography as tools of social and political commentary. This text explores the visual commentaries on colonialism by Akinola Lasekan and the critiques of postcolonial military and civilian leaderships conceived by prominent cartoonists such as Kenny Adamson, Josy Ajiboye, dele jegede, Bisi Ogunbadejo, Boye Gbenro, and Tayo Fatunla. And in the global arena, the book further explores the triad of identity, power, and parody in the postmodern photographs and installations of Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Yinka Shonibare, two London-based artists of Yoruba descent. While this book complements previous studies of satire among the Yoruba as an aspect of ritualized performance traditions, it departs from such studies by exploring its appropriations in secular spaces of contemporary visual culture. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "In original, compelling arguments, Ola considers both direct and oblique influences that the Yoruba trickster deity Esu has had on specific works by each artist. Summing up: Recommended." -- CHOICE Magazine

This book investigates the dynamics and challenges of ethnicity and elite politics in Nigeria.

DIVEthnographic study of life and ritual in an African American Yorùbá revivalist community in South Carolina and its complex relation to Nigerian Yorùbá identity./div

In this book, Suzanne Preston Blier examines the intersection of art, risk and creativity in early African arts from the Yoruba center of Ife and the striking ways that ancient Ife artworks inform society, politics, history and religion. Yoruba art offers a unique lens into one of Africa's most important and least understood early civilizations, one whose historic arts have long been of interest to local residents and Westerners alike because of their tour-de-force visual power and technical complexity. Among the complementary subjects explored are questions of art making, art viewing and aesthetics in the famed ancient Nigerian city-state, as well as the attendant risks and danger assumed by artists, patrons and viewers alike in certain forms of subject matter and modes of portrayal, including unique genres of body marking, portraiture, animal symbolism and regalia. This volume celebrates art, history and the shared passion and skill with which the remarkable artists of early Ife sought to define their past for generations of viewers.