Chiji Akoma

My field is contemporary Anglophone African and African Diaspora literatures, including African oral performance studies. I’m particularly interested in Caribbean folklore and literary traditions, African oral literature, drama, fiction, and postcolonial studies. My first book, Folklore in New World Black Fiction: Writing and the Oral Traditional Aesthetics (The Ohio State UP, 2007), examines the fiction of two Americans, Toni Morrison and Jean Toomer, and two Guyanese, Wilson Harris and Roy Heath, for the myriad of ways they call attention to the intersections between orality and literacy, especially in relation to African oral performance aesthetics. 

As a long-standing member of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa (ISOLA) and once served as the Society’s President, I have been privileged to have an active involvement in the exciting research going on in African oral arts. In 2023, Nduka Otiono and I co-edited Oral Literary Performance in Africa: Beyond Text (Routledge) a collection of 16 essays by emerging and established scholars in the field which offers a robust examination of key issues in the field of African oral literatures and performance, including a section of the book dedicated to an appreciation of the scholarship of the late Professor Isidore Okpewho, unarguably one of the influential scholars of African oral traditions in the last 45 years. Again with Nduka, we served as Guest Editors of the oldest African literature journal, African Literature Today, for the special edition on African language literatures. 

Lately, I have been drawn into the task of recovering Igbo language fiction, especially as this body of literature from southeastern Nigeria appears to have been drowned out by the resounding success of such writers as Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who are Igbo authors, addressing the Igbo experience, but writing in the English language. I am part of a team that launched Ugegbe, an academic journal in Igbo language, which is one of its kind. Still in its infancy, we hope that it will one day be the #1 reference point for Igbo language and culture scholars and students. I have completed the translation to English of Enyinna Akọma’s Obidiya (Oxford UP, 1977), a critically acclaimed play written in Igbo to increase the awareness of English readers of the rich literary production going in Nigeria, the primary homeland of the Igbo. My next book project is on Igbo popular theatre based on a television series set in the colonial era. The work attempts to find new uses for postcolonial theory even as it privileges the exploration of Igbo folk aesthetics in drama.

Along with my teaching and research, I am the Chair of the Department of Global Interdisciplinary Studies, Villanova’s undergrad-focused powerhouse of global studies, including critical language studies in Arabic, Chinese, Irish, Japanese, Russian, and Swahili.