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Critics of the Oyo Empire and Atlantic Modernity in the Age of Revolution: Rethinking Black Atlantic Historiography with Archaeology and Òrìṣà Archives
December 4, 2023 @ 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm
December 4th, 2023
5:30 pm -7:00 pm
Silver Center, Hemmerdinger Hall
In this talk, Ogundiran will discuss the debates and dialogues that happened in the Oyo Empire (West Africa) in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries about rights and privileges, marginalization and power, and politics of difference between the metropolis and the provinces, women and men, and the state and society. These dialogues, he argues, were part of the discontentment with Early Modernity that gave birth to the Age of Revolution. However, Africa has been mostly elided from the historiography of this revolutionary period because the modalities of Africa-centered dialogues about the early modern experience have been outside the reach of traditional historical methods. Ogundiran demonstrates the need to pay attention to the Yorùbá Òrìṣà archives and the archaeology of place in order to broaden the historiography of the Black Atlantic and the Age of Revolution.
Akin Ogundiran is Cardiss Collins Professor of History and Arts & Sciences at Northwestern University and a Senior Fellow of Gardens and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC. He is broadly interested in the archaeology and history of Africa over the past 2,500 years, with an emphasis on the Yorùbá world. His research has been supported by the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the American Philosophical Society. He is the author/editor/co-editor of several books, including The Yorùbá: A New History (2020), winner of the Vinson Sutlive Prize and Isaac Delano Prize.
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For accommodations, please contact the Administrative Aide for the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora at Muna.Diaf@nyu.edu by November 20th, 2023.