Dr. Rebecca Jones ⎻ Crossing borders, encountering others, telling stories: a century of Nigerian travel writing in Yoruba and English (VIRTUAL)

Join the Zoom meeting (Meeting ID: 964 8250 3467; Passcode: 519001)

In this virtual talk, Dr. Rebecca Jones will discuss how Nigerian travel writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have written about the ways they have experienced the world through their own and others’ bodies. Focusing on Nigerian writers writing about travel within Nigeria, writing in both English and Yoruba (one of Nigeria’s major languages), she considers how Nigerian authors writing in a range of different historical and social contexts, and using a variety of literary genres, have represented the movement of their bodies through space, their embodied perceptions of the world and, in particular, moments of their bodies crossing borders and encountering others, as a way of telling stories about the complex history of colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. This talk draws on and expands ideas discussed in Jones’ book, At the Crossroads: Nigerian Travel Writing and Literary Culture in Yoruba and English (James Currey, 2019).

Rebecca Jones is a scholar of Nigerian print, literary and popular cultures in the Yoruba and English languages, with an emphasis on archival research and on literary and popular texts. Her research to date has centred on the history of Nigerian-authored travel writing in both Yoruba and English; her monograph, At the Crossroads: Nigerian Travel Writing in Yoruba and English was published by James Currey in 2019. She was previously a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology (DASA), University of Birmingham, UK; she is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at DASA and works as a Research and Policy Manager at a UK-based charity.