Telling Our Stories (PDF)

ADETAYO ALABI taught Postcolonial and International Literatures at Millikin University in Illinois, USA and at the University of Windsor in Canada. He published entries in the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Literatures and in The Companion to African Literatures. He has also published several chapters in books, including Ogoni's Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria, The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, and Marvels of the African World: African Cultural Patrimony, New World Connections, and Identities; and in journals like Liwuram, African Literature Today, and In-Between.

"Black is the color of the autobiographies that Adetayo Alabi rereads in Telling Our Stories. Slaves, creative writers, and political activists, the self-conscious narrators in writing and through readers create communities and establish continuities - across both centuries and continents, from the African slave trade to the United States civil rights movement and the Caribbean 'lionhearted gal.' Alabi's radical reactivation of autobiography as a genre of resistance and mobilization is a compelling inquiry into a critical past and on behalf of an even more crucial promise." - Barbara Harlow, The University of Texas at Austin

"Alabi's book is a long overdue and most welcome addition to the scholarly library on 'the African diaspora.' A major distinguishing mark of this field of study is the exploration of the links between regional segments of the Black world, in terms of continuities and divergences in their recognition of their common racial backgrounds and histories. Alabi makes two other valuable contributions to this field: one, an inclusion of oral African texts in his discussion of the genre; and two, an especially welcome interrogation of the concept of 'autobiography' employed in Western discourses of the genre. Now I am finally ready to teach the course I have been planning for!" - Isidore Okpewho, State University of New York, Binghamton

"The book offers a dexterous analysis of three fundamental terms of modern black self definition: individuality, communality, and resistance. Alabi teaches readers of black autobiography how tropes of individualism dwells in narratives of the collective." - Adélékè Adéèkò, University of Colorado, Boulder

"This book theorizes on testimonial narratives from both sides of the Atlantic. Race, class, and gender go "marching on" in this significant cross-cultural analysis. Telling Our Stories convenes a trans-Atlantic exegetical festival with familiar voices of modern griots such as Nelson Mandela,