Ibadan modernism: Poetry and the literary present in mid-century Nigeria

Abstract

This article traces the early careers of Nigerian writers educated in the 1950s at University College, Ibadan, through the appearance of their poetry in student magazines and limited-edition collections. Adapting Pascale Casanova’s concept of the literary present, it highlights what these published texts reveal about the position of modernist poetics in the literary system of the day. Ibadan modernism, it contends, emerged through aspiring writers’ dialectical relationship to the colonial university, which mediated to them metropolitan perceptions of the literary present. While the Ibadan writers, along with African and expatriate allies, soon developed their own cultural institutions, the fact that the CIA underwrote the most notable of these institutions — the journal Black Orpheus, the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, and Mbari Publications — suggests the extent to which aesthetic and cultural autonomy is historically negotiated rather than simply achieved.