Francis Abiola Irele: contemplations on the ‘power of events and the African experience’ in African literature.

Abstract

Throughout his professional career, Professor Francis Abiola Irele worked to celebrate African arts and letters. His reflective life of the mind sought meaning in both traditional and contemporary African life and experience. Irele’s spirit of intellectual generosity, almost boundless in its scope of substantive observation and depth, contributed substantially to the development of African literary studies. Beginning with his monograph, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, through his editorships of encyclopedia and journals, this essay examines how Irele crafted a theoretical framework that lifted and continues to maintain African literary studies unto the world stage. In many ways, Irele’s contributions to African literary studies, substantiates Frantz Fanon’s statement that, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” Irele’s intellectual oeuvre closely observed and followed the rise of African literature’s capacity to defy a continent’s subjugation as it strives to fulfill a civilizational shift in ways that continue to engage the imagination of African intellectuals and Africanists, globally.