Sanya Osha: You had an extraordinary childhood by most standards.

You grew up in Ibadan, a bustling metropolis but you were molded on core Yoruba values. Can you talk about what these values are, the people that guided you in learning them, and how they have shaped your life?

Toyin Falola: Answer

I’ll answer your question by saying that values such as respect, diligence, accountability, truthfulness, humility, honesty, fairness, devotion and loyalty, among others, have an indestructible place in the Yorùbá world, and every member of the society is, by default, saddled with the responsibility of instilling these values into anyone, especially the younger ones. To this extent, everyone understands what is expected of all members of society in terms of moral responsibilities and would make efforts to play their part in the process. In essence, the Yorùbá people, in pre-independence Africa and the early period of post-independence Africa, did not find a shortage of avenues where they would be educated in what society expected of them. This philosophy is designed from the understanding that the people's collective identity is important and deserves to be managed by everyone so that they would not invite damnation into society or to themselves. The sociological infrastructure of the people was weaved to accommodate this sentiment in its entirety. As such, everyone understood that an elder's intervention with a child who demonstrates morally suspicious behavior is an act of social responsibility and not vilification of the child. In essence, the Yoruba society created the mental space to embrace that intervention and interjection in the spirit that it would substantially assist in structuring the society in ways that would assist the Yorùbá world to make progress. By the time, the children who defaulted on the collective moral expectations are reprimanded by the elders, they silently but apparently adjust themselves to the moral ideology of the community to the extent that they would consciously debar themselves from committing moral offenses that would invite external intervention. This comes from two different reasons. One, a child who habitually commits moral crimes would be socially interpreted as sound evidence of failed parenting, by which case the parents, and sometimes by extension, the family unit, would have their share of the blame.

The Training of González Echevarría.

FGH: What would you like to remember about your training years (BA University of South Florida (1964), MA Indiana University (1966), PhD Yale (1970)?

RGE: I have very pleasant memories of professors who were key in my training. At the University of South Florida, these professors did not produce a big written work, but they were great teachers. I am thinking of Edward McClean, Charles Micareli, Adrian Cherry and others in French and Italian. At Indiana, I had the good fortune of being a student of Miguel Enguíanos, a brilliant and warm professor from Valencia with whom I would spend hours talking in his office when I was twenty years old, which is when I started graduate school. Octavio Corbalán, a subtle Argentinian from Tucumán was also there. He wrote about “postmodernismo,” because that is how it was called [already in the 1960s]. and he taught me a lot of things about writing style. I was lucky because that was a moment of growth in the department. Américo Castro passed through to give a talk. Ana María Matute gave a course about fiction-writing. I studied with her. Antonio Ferres, Ignacio Aldecoa, Rosario Castellanos, etc. Lots of writers went through the department and I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot from a Mexican professor, Ortigoza by name, who gave very detailed courses on the Golden Age [period] and from Quentin Hope, a professor of XVII French theater. Prof. Houston who gave an excellent seminar on Proust. When I arrived at Yale, it was the beginning of the boom of structuralism. I was student of Hispanists such as [the Spaniard] Manuel Durán, who was my dissertation advisor, the Cuban José Arrom, the Colombian Gustavo Correa and others who were visiting professors. [I studied] in French with Jacques Ehrmann, who sadly died very young. He was one among those who gave entrance to structuralism in the U.S. via Yale and the journal Yale French Studies that published a very important issue at that time. Because I have always been between Spanish, French and Italian, it was also the Italian professor John Freccero. At some point, Paul de Man arrived. I attended the classes of Harold Bloom.

The Professional History of Rolena Adorno.

FGH: What would you like to recall in relation to your training (BA U of Iowa, Spanish, 1964; MA privatim Yale U, 1966; PhD Cornell U, Spanish Literature [sic], 1974)?

RA: I think that the undergraduate experience was really key in my case because I came from a nonacademic family, no one having gone to the university before. And, for me, to discover the humanities, and the study of the Spanish language and literature, although I came to it late, was the most important educational experience I had. What was attractive to me about it was that it was so different from my own cultural background. I had that interest in something that was very different from that which I had known and from which I had come. What sealed that interest for me, although I was trained to be a secondary school teacher and did teach one year, in fact one year after I graduated from college, was the opportunity to have a Fulbright scholarship to Spain. That changed what was already a serious interest, not quite on the spot but over the course of that year in Madrid, into a lifelong commitment and a lifelong passion that I didn't yet know how to give shape to because I married right after that Fulbright year and took over the raising of my husband's four daughters and couldn't yet quite see myself going through graduate school. But I did. It was a natural consequence with very much the support of my family and my husband, David [Adorno] and the girls. The very remarkable master's degree from Yale, is simply the last degree because one has to have a Yale graduate degree in order to be a member of the Yale permanent faculty. So, this in privatim degree is in fact a ceremonial one that means that I teach at Yale as a member of the permanent faculty. My PhD years at Cornell were wildly different than [anything] I had thought they might have been. Simply because I started out looking to study something that I knew something about, which was the theater of Golden-Age Spain as is called, the comedia del Siglo de Oro, and in the course of centering on that historical period the advice given to me was to take a course in the colonial area.

Toyin Falola, an extraordinarily prolific historian, is undoubtedly an astonishing academic phenomenon of our times. Over the past four decades, the Nigerian-born scholar has contributed significantly to virtually all the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences spanning history (ancient, modern and contemporary), political science, art theory, poetry, literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, ethnic studies, globalization studies, ethnology, and the related disciplines of African and black diasporan studies. Such prodigiousness, versatility, and excellence in contemporary scholarship are rare, and therefore truly remarkable. But beyond the mere celebration of extraordinary academic achievement, there needs to be accompanying events to signpost and etch them in the annals of history.

Falola, in his work and life, affirms several African adages pertaining to the primacy of the collective ethos. The ancient African virtues and values of conviviality, communalism and reciprocity are central to his intellectual practice and lived experiences. An author, editor and co-editor of almost 200 academic volumes, his various intellectual projects have involved drawing together different African, Africa-descended and Africanist scholars of diverse ideological and theoretical persuasions in a bewildering assortment of collaborative ventures. Africa thus is not conceptualized as the homeland alone but viewed as part of an existential, historical, political and geostrategic continuum involving other black cultures in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean and South America.

This attests to a manifestation of Pan-Africanism in theory and practice. Falola is a Pan-Africanist of the activist stripe, and his global impact in this regard can be broadly perceived. In his numerous research projects in various parts of the Africana world, he developed life-long contacts and relationships with fellow travelers on the Pan-Africanist path. In thought and practice, he has diligently promoted the necessity and verities of Pan-African beliefs and philosophy. Africans everywhere are united through the disastrous histories of slavery, colonization, decolonization, and neocolonial oppression and their enduring legacies. Thus, if we are united in our forms of oppression, we should also stand together in overcoming them and building solid foundations for future generations. It is this kind of practical philosophy that is evident in Falola's intellectual practice and numerous extracurricular activities.

I am proposing the staging of five critical conversations in the original context of the American academy in the United States. My interlocutors are Walter D. Mignolo, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa and Roberto González Echevarría. These are undoubtedly five influential names whose scholarly work asks for re-readings and re-framings as we look both ways, that is, toward the immediate past, the 1980s onwards, and the more distant past, Early Modern/colonial times, and to be sure toward the ominous future inside the few embedded fragilities, institutional and otherwise, of a present crisis informing the foreign humanities. This precarity is true state of affairs in the United States and elsewhere, but I want to focus, for now, on the troubles of the super-power and its tentacular institutions of higher learning inside which we must imagine these five noted names. By foreign humanities, I mean to invoke the double consciousness of DuBois-pedigree that takes into account the insufficiencies of the immediate, native, hegemonic or mainstream, dominant-national official circumstance inside which an emergence of a possibly different and desirable foreign dimension or horizon may take place (”extranjero” and “extranjerizante” in Spanish within and against conventionally xenophobic frames of intelligibility, also present inside university settings). Affirmations of foreignness must therefore make any form of nativism incomplete and undesirable. This is one book, and there are two others that should follow soon.

What I am doing here? I am seeking critical “humanistic” intelligence and one thousand thoughts and feelings wrapped around myriad avatars of university life in our tumultuous times. The time frame begins in the 1980s and reaches us today. Things come out when things come out, and some of these conversations have selectively surfaced partially previously or not at all in the previous two decades. Three took place in Spanish (Mignolo, Rabasa, González Echevarría), and two in English (Beverley, Adorno). The website of the book for Anthem Press includes the original audios [The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect (anthempress.com)]. Both versions (print and audio) will play, I am sure, in the bilingual imagination of those invested in translation and interpretation studies, but this is only the beginning. There is so much more: a rich landscape of scholarship and criticism in the foreign humanities in the vicinity of the Hispanophone sectors within, and perhaps against Anglophone hegemonies.

Sango, the popular Yoruba deity, is worshipped in many parts of the world where footprints of Yoruba culture are to be discerned. Such footprints litter wide swathes of West Africa and of course, the Americas which were a key destination during the transatlantic slave trade. And through the global dispersal of the Yoruba during the slave trade, their religion, often referred to as orisa, became a widely known system of worship and veneration. The number of Yoruba deities has been put at 401 but it is advised that this should be regarded as a metaphorical ascription rather than actual computational truth. Many deities are duplicated in various communities and this would account for their initial prolixity.

However, it is mostly agreed that the objects of spiritual veneration are not more than 200. Orisa are categorized into two broad classifications namely canonized forebears or deified elements of nature such as earth, wind and fire. They are further divided into metaphorically white deities (orisa funfun) such as Obatala, Osun, Yemoja, Olokun and Osoosi and hot deities (orisa gbigbona), most notably, Ogun, Sango, Osanyin/Obaluaye and Oya. White deities are often described as “gentle, soothing, calm, and reflective.” Hot or temperamental deities, on the other hand, are notably “harsh, demanding, aggressive, and quick tempered.”

It is instructive to note that orisa are not classified according to a vertical hierarchy or order of superiority and all of them are known to have both positive and negative attributes. It is also useful to mention that “the relative importance of any orisa in any given part of Yorubaland reflects the deity's relative local popularity, reputation, and influence.”3 Nonetheless, the extent of influence and veneration each deity enjoys worldwide differs. For instance, deities such as Ogun, Sango, Obatala, Osun, and Oya are indeed venerated globally (Ramos, 1987; Ramos, 1996; Reis, 2003; Reis and Ecuardo, 1989; Ribeiro, 2005, 1987; Rodriguez, 1977, 1995, 1997; Roland, 1988; Saburi, 1973; Samuel, 1852, 1921a, 1921b).

Sango, specifically, is deemed to be most potent and most feared both within the traditional Yoruba homelands of West Africa and in the diaspora. His acolytes in Trinidad and Tobago refer to him as “Papa Sango” as a term of endearment.

The Training of José Rabasa.

FGH: What are some important moments in your training? BA in Philosophy and Literature from Universidad de las Américas (1971); MA in Philosophy from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1978); PhD in the Program of History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1985). What would you like to remember now?

JR: I may want to remember my interdisciplinary orientation at the beginning. It was literatura and philosophy intimately connected. My work in Mexico was frustrated at the graduate level. This was due to a series of grotesque situations. I had to let that go or rather I could not find time to make it work. I was doing my MA with Ramón Xirau who underwent a paranoia after an intimate friend of his, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at UNAM, was assassinated. A very tense situation was created. He almost walled himself in his house and you had to go to see him and it was not easy to get in. I don't know if we could make it public, but I am answering your question. It is important in the sense that I had to leave it behind. My CV registers a thesis that I never defended for various reasons. It was impossible. It was 1978 and I had been completing my graduate studies at UNAM since 1971. Several things happened: I obtained a post in Morelia at the Universidad San Nicolás Hidalgo, which got interrupted for the writing of the thesis. I spent several months trying to structure the defense of the thesis that never happened. The possibility to go to Santa Cruz came up. Instead of waiting in Mexico for another semester seeking the possibility of defending the thesis, I left it behind. Santa Cruz had important changes. There was a very interesting group. Hayden White had arrived. James Clifford was beginning to work on the history of anthropology. In connection to the colonial Latin American context, Jorge Klor de Alva was also there. This was an interesting trio. In the field of Latin American literature, Marta Morelo Froschi, whose suggestions and interventions were very useful, was also there.

Thabo Mbeki, ex-president of South Africa (1999–2008), turned 80 years old on April 18, 2022. After a special event was organized at the Sandton Centre, Johannesburg, the Toyin Falola Interviews hosted another session of dialogues. The Toyin Falola Interviews is a remarkable forum that organizes public dialogues with highly distinguished Africans from all spheres of life most especially in politics, academia, social activism, culture and the arts. The Mbeki event was viewed by reportedly half of the South African population and over 30 million people worldwide including 13 heads of states across various countries. The session which also featured two young Nigerians, a poet and a singer, who honored Mbeki with their talents, lasted well over three hours.

Mbeki was interviewed by the renowned Malawian historian, Paul Zeleza and veteran South African TV anchorwoman, Naledi Moleo. Ultimately, Mbeki was warmly celebrated as an African giant, a true scion of Africa whose impact has been felt in several countries on the continent. Mbeki dwelled extensively on his various pet issues such as Pan-Africanism (repeatedly questioned by frequent xenophobic outbreaks in South Africa), the rebirth of the African National Congress, xenophobia, African renaissance, conflict resolution (solutions, Mbeki argued, come from ownership of conflict resolution processes). He touched on crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Cameroon, South Sudan, and Ivory Coast. Finally, he addressed the July 2021 riots in Durban and Johannesburg, the importance of active youth organizations to aid development, the educational crisis in South Africa, the challenges of the African Union (AU) (the decline of the AU's political commission after being subsumed under peace and security), neocolonialism, the G8, HIV/Aids (a major botch on his regime) and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The structure of the landmark Mbeki-Africa exchange was divided between South African affairs and broader continental issues. Zeleza and the rest of the audience who were invited to ask questions claimed Mbeki for the whole of Africa. Moleo tended to bring it all back home to South Africa.

I remember the night in 2014, after a delicious bout of carousing, when discussions casually devolved upon the possibilities of producing a book on Falola's vast corpus. I was swamped with the regular academic duties of teaching, marking scripts and mentoring amid other sundry administrative worries. But still, it seemed a viable endeavor for the future.

In between, Falola included me in other pivotal projects; a Nelson Mandela collaborative volume he edited for Carolina Academic Press in 2014; The imaginatively conceived and executed Indiana University Press released Encyclopedia of the Yoruba in 2016; The lavish Palgrave Macmillan Handbook of African Philosophy in 2017; The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook of African Social Ethics in 2020 being the major ones. Of course, there were other numerous occasions to collaborate. I attended most of the inspiring Toyin Falola Interview Series in which he and other panelists grilled distinguished African leaders and scholars on various continental matters. Falola's life and work are invariably filled with an endless stream of activities, projects and events. But in his personal relations, one never senses the frenetic pace of those prolific activities. He is usually calm and solicitous in conversation and in my case, he listened far more than he shared his views. He always seemed to want to know what I thought about a wide range of issues and ideas. His publishers and editors would solicit blurbs for his unending array of book projects. He would ask for opinions on book proposals he was working on. He endlessly shared his equally prodigious articles in popular media for comments and reactions. I was overawed by his productivity and equanimity.

Meanwhile, my book project on his outstanding corpus stuttered and puttered. When I wasn't battling other cares and commitments, I was tearing out my hair about finding a suitable conceptual and theoretical approach to a project that threatened to drown me on account of its innate shapelessness and vastness. And then my philosophical training asserted itself. Perhaps it wasn't judicious to approach Falola's work from the point of view of its stupendous prodigality.

About Formative Stages.

FGH: What are the fundamental stages in your education? What early biographical data would you like to include?

WM: They are all important. I begin with primary and secondary. I should mention a small place in Argentina, Corral de Bustos, and then the Universidad Nacional in Cordoba from 1961 to 1962 until 1968. I started studying philosophy there. I passed through anthropology and ended up completing modern languages. In 1969, I obtained a fellowship and I went to France to complete my graduate studies in semiology and literary theory. I completed my PhD in France in 1974 and then I quit studying (laughter).

FGH: You came to the U.S. in 1974?

WM: Yes. I finished [my studies] and I came here. I came before finishing for a bit, but it is unimportant.

FGH: What are the periods in your intellectual training? Initially, I would mention three: the structural-semiologist “French” Mignolo, although you no longer publicize this period too much. I confess I do not know it well […]

WM: This first period is already gone, although I still like, with the benefit of the distance, the writing of my doctoral dissertation, which two years later, generated the first book. It is the semiological period, discourse analysis and literary theory. I was writing this sort of thing until 1986-1987, although there is already a period in 1980-1981, in which I publish an article “Cartas, Crónicas y Relaciones” [“Letters, Chronicles, Narration”] in which I begin to go into the colonial question. But I do so not through colonialism, but in relation to the question, “What was history like and what was it like to write about it in the XVI century in relation to Western Indies (“Indias Occidentales”)”? This was 1981. And this took me to write the book The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization [orig. 1995 (Second edition 2003)]. But first things first: I wrote three books in my semiological period, focusing on literary theory and discourse analysis: Elements for a theory of the literary text [Elementos para una teoría del texto literario] in 1978, Modern Text and Metaphor [Texto Moderno y Metáfora] in 1984 and Textual Theory and Textual Interpretation [Teoría del Texto e Interpretación del Texto] in 1986.

The History of John Beverley.

FGH: What would you like to recall as salient points in your training and formative years? [BA at Princeton (1964) and PhD in California, San Diego (1972)]? (Birth: Venezuela, 1943). What would you say your most important moments in between those two places are?

JB: I probably started getting interested in literature when I was in prep school. Apart from having brought up in Latin America, I have a conventional childhood. My father was a Republican businessman. In the late 1950s, there was existentialism and the Beat generation, so I started getting interested in this kind of material, especially the Beats. Because I spent a lot of time in Latin America and also after the Cuban Revolution that made Spanish and Latin American issues more urgent, I thought it would be okay to major in Spanish literature as opposed to English literature, philosophy, or history, which were the popular majors. I thought, “Why not do Spanish Literature?” I already had something of an interdisciplinary thing. I was in a program then called “Special Program in European Civilization,” where you majored in one department, but then you would have to take related courses in other departments. These related courses I took were mainly in philosophy. I had a second major in philosophy. That is where I took a course with Richard Rorty, who, just as a junior professor, was not so famous then. But I thought he taught a great course on analytic philosophy. At Princeton, I was mostly focusing on Spanish literature and the Baroque period. For some reason, I got into the Baroque. I had some friends. We got to listen to music together, we took peyote together, we would listen to Bach and stuff like that. All of that is very deep into the Baroque, I would say. We would look at books of painting and stuff like that. I was getting interested in Marxism too, without really knowing very much about it, mainly because of the Cuban Revolution. I started to read some Marxism and to identify myself as a socialist. I belonged to the Princeton Socialist Club.

Falola's most recent research traces the globalization of the Yoruba people in terms of history, culture, transformation, and change. Undoubtedly, this approach is a vast advancement on all previous similar projects, including that of Samuel Johnson's History of the Yoruba, which is a landmark work on the Yoruba in the late nineteenth century. The Yoruba are currently found in the southwest part of Nigeria, the Republic of Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Ivory Coast. Falola sets himself a dual problem: “What the Yoruba receive from the outside world (as in the cases of Islam and Christianity)” and “What they contribute to the world beyond them” (as in the case of Orisa and the Aladura/Pentecostal churches of Britain and the United States; Abimbola, 1973, 1975, 1976a, 1976b, 1977, 1981, 1998; Abiodun, 1975; Abraham, 1962; Addie, 1990; Adebisi, 1986; Adedeji, 1966; Adegbile, 1999; Adelugba, 1981; Adeoye, 1979, 1985; Adewoye, 1987; Afolabi, 2001; Afolayan, 2000; Ahye, 1981; Aiyejina & Rawle, 1999; Ajayi, 1974, 2000; Ajuwon, 1981; Akanmu, 1999; Akinjogbin, 1972; Akinjogbin, 2002, Akinjogbin, 1976; Akinyemi, 2004; Alade, 1992, 1995; Andrew, 1987; Atanda, 1980, 1973; Awe, 1973; Aweda 2002; Awolalu, 2001, 1979; Ayodeji, 1999; Babalola, 1966; Babayemi, 1973; Babayemi, 1979, 1976; Badejo, 1982, 2004; Balderson et al., 2002; Bamidele, 2003; Barber, 1989, 1981, 1979, 1984; Barnes, 1989; Bascom, 1973, 1969, 1972, 1980; Bastide, 1945, 1978, 1986; Baudin, 1884; Beier, 1994, 1959, 1980, 1960; Benkomo, 2000; Bettelheim, 2001; Bewaji, 1992; Biobaku, 1975; Birth, 1999; Bolaji, 1962; Bomfim, 1940; Borghero, 1865, 1997; Bourguignon, 2000; Bowen, 1858; Braga, 1992, 1995; Brain, 1980; Brereton, 1979; Browker, 1997; Brown, 2003; Burket, 1985).

In seeking to understand the origins, culture, and history of the Yoruba, Falola adopts the Akan concept of Sankofa, which means understanding the present via the lens of history. In exploring the rich historical experience of the Yoruba people, Falola's work surveys events spanning at least ten centuries. Beginning from ancient times, the Yoruba had interactions with their neighbors such as the Borgu, Benin, Nupe, Dahomey, the Hausa states and the Songhai Empire. Here, we glean evident traces of the multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism that would come to characterize the lives of many diasporic Yoruba.

The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations has addressed the profession of the foreign humanities in relation to five outstanding figures situated in the immediate setting of the United States of America (”foreign” or non-U.S. horizons, or bigger world/s inside which the superpower is but an hegemonic part, but not the whole world, and both uneven dimensions get tangled up). This immigrant piece of scholarship spanning two decades wants to encourage foreign entanglements against any form of nativism: the more, the better. In so doing I still like the idea of mise en abyme, the “abyssal perspective” or “play within the play.” That is, self-consciouness inside the American circumstances finds itself fighting for signification and recognition. I do so here in relation to the “Latin” American scene, now less benign and less giving, in these hard times of relative U.S. decline or interregnum. Hence, I continue suggesting “staging” in the afterword as I close down bringing the critical attention to our five noted figures, looking at them in the eye so to speak. We are still -and for how long?-- in the “Anglo Zone” on both sides of the Atlantic, and the said rubric refers to the hegemonic Anglophone North Atlantic, no locus amoenus, but embattled timespace in which myriad exchanges and (de-) links take place in the lingua franca, but not exclusively. These conversation pieces have included the names of Walter D. Mignolo, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa and Roberto González Echevarría in the original chronological order that can be easily upset.There are different localities (Washington, DC, shortly before 9/11, the city of Pittsburgh, Berkeley and Stanford, also New Haven). There are different states: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, California and Connecticut. There are six representative institutions: Duke University, University of Pittsburgh, University of California, Berkeley and Yale University—add Stanford University. The affiliations were Departments of Spanish and Portuguese, Hispanic Studies and Romance Studies and there are new rubrics now in some quarters (Latin American and Iberian among different versions of comparative literature and culture). Other disciplines such as anthropology, philosophy, history, sociology, art are brought forward. International relations and foreign affairs are always implied and I still feel that these ‘externalities’ should be made more explicit. I will continue pursuing these associations between for-eign humanities and foreign affairs in the near future.