This book brings together a collection of works that critically exam the significance and place of Professor Toyin Falola’s scholarship within and beyond African historiography as well as engage emerging ideas, forgotten/ignored histories, and research issues in African history and African Diaspora studies. The volume draws on multidisciplinary perspectives to dialogue such issues as research frontiers Falola’s scholarship has opened for the field of African history, how to consolidate/articulate or even disarticulate those frontiers, the work strategies that influence his scholarly output, and the path he has charted for African historians. In many ways, Falola’s scholarship cannot be captured under any one specific title, for as his scholarship shows, he is, indeed, Beyond the Boundaries, engaging both conventional and nonconventional issues.  

Professor Falola has distinguished himself as one of Africa’s most important intellectuals in contemporary times. His work challenges not just the legacies of European imperialism in Africa and conventional thinking, but also forces us out of our comfort zones, perspectives, ideas, theories, and methods and challenges us to be more supple, more informed, more daring, and more inquiring. The contributors took up the challenge and covered a wide range of topics on colonialism, Nigerian nationalism, Yoruba studies, Ibadan studies, culture and identity, economic history, women and gender, African Diaspora, and tradition and modernity. The collection is joined together by one single source of motivation—ideas of Professor Falola.

Amponsah has put together a rich book that places Toyin Falola at the center of African historiography, and by doing so moves us closer to understanding the full complexity of his scholarship, in addition to revealing the culture that underpins his life and career.

—Akin Alao, Professor of History, Obafemi Awolowo University.

Beyond the Boundaries is a significant landmark celebration of Toyin Falola’s 60th birthday, and his profoundly successful career. It is a fresh addition to the “Falola collection,” the seventh festschrift in the attempt to understand Falola’s historicism. The essays are delivered in digestible chapters portraying spectacular viewpoints that mirror the complex compartments of an extremely rich mind.

—Ademola Omobewaji Dasylva, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

ABOUT THE EDITOR

NANA AKUA AMPONSAH is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She specializes in the History of West Africa and the African Diaspora with particular focus in Women, Gender, Sexualities, Reproductive Health, Oral History and Historical Memory. Her recent publications include a co-authored book, Women’s Roles in Sub-Saharan Africa and a co-edited volume, Women, Gender, and Sexualities in Africa.

CATEGORIES

History, Diaspora and Gender Studies/AFRICA