About

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is a Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University and has served as interim chair of the African American & African Studies Department from fall 2020 to spring 2023. His academic background includes a B.A. in Education/English and an M.A. in Literature in English from Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida. His research interests encompass literary theory, American ethnic literatures, Yorùbá literature, speech act patterns, and Anglophone literatures of South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. He has published widely on these topics and has directed undergraduate research projects and mentored many graduate students. His current ambition is to complete a comprehensive book on speech acts in poetry. Prior to his tenure at Ohio State, he taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder for 15 years, where he served as chair of the Department of Comparative Literature & Humanities. He has also held leadership roles such as president of the African Literature Association and director of the Abiola Irele Seminar in Theory & Criticism at Kwara State University, Nigeria.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Philosophy
• Engineering
• Literature
• Gender studies
• Genealogy
• Operations research
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• Art
• History
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• “Befitting Burial”, or Conviviality in the Work of Mourning

  Journal of African Cultural Studies · 2025-10-13

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Institutions of African literature: introduction

  Journal of the African Literature Association · 2021-03-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  “Institutions of African Literature” was the theme of the 45th annual conference and meeting of the African Literature Association, held May 15–19, 2019, in Columbus, Ohio. Articles in this cluster...

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• Lẹyìn Kété Nibi N Sẹlẹ

  2021-11-02

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter will systematize the recurrence of disasters in Femi Osofisan’s farcical novella, Kolera Kolej, and the machinations of destiny in Ola Rótìmí’s tragic play, The Gods Are Not to Blame, by reading textual plot with terms derived from Yorùbá metalanguage of experience and events, viz., kété and ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀. While kété, an ideophone, is the term for “promptness” and “convention,” ìṣẹ̀lẹ̀, a compound term for place and happenstance, denotes occurrence, usually relating to that which is unexpected or unplanned but, nevertheless, could be envisaged. The two terms are joined and further reorganized in the meta-narrative proverb “lẹ́yìn kété nibi ń ṣẹlẹ̀” (catastrophe breaks out in the wake of missed time). The punctual occurrence arrives on time, as scheduled, and as expected. The tardy (late or delayed) relates to the prompt, even in its deviation. The length of the experience of the disastrous relates to the amount of time expended on the restoration of the regime of the prompt. Yorùbá metalanguage of events collocates duration and location, two irreducible components of events as variants of the ideophone: instituted (emplaced), constitutions of experiences that could not be presented otherwise.

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• Reading Yorùbá Literature

  2021-01-09 · 1 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Decolonization without a linguistic turn is like drinking sugar without tea: Ọlábíyìí Babalọlá Joseph Yáì

  Journal of the African Literature Association · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Linguistics
  • Sociology

  This article interpretes highlights of the intellectual legacies of Ọlábíyìí Yáì (1939–2020), Beninois/Yorùbá, linguist and literary theorist, as revealing expressions of the autonomy strivings of the first generation of university based African scholars in the westernized academy. The “linguistic turn” group of scholars to which Yáì belonged pioneered a rigorous, systematic, ordinary language analysis of Afriphonic speech and cultural pragmatics. They made axiomatic, and rendered foundational, the position that Afriphonic languages are repositories of second order thinking.

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• Introduction

  The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry · 2020-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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• Postcolonial Critique in Ryan Coogler’s <i>Black Panther</i>

  The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  The article addresses two aspects of postcolonial critique in Black Panther : first, its portrayal of the allure of grand statements in the cultivation of conspicuous and persistent self-regard in societies that wish to be recognizably independent, and second the centrality of repeatedly embodied material gestures and motions for the sustenance of enduring communal self-regard. These two prominent features of storytelling in the film, it will be argued, offer a powerful criticism of indifferent, ideology free, and barely disguised fatalism that has driven notions of freedom across the world since the collapse of the old Soviet Union. Storytelling in Black Panther enjoys global acclaim because it revivifies the life-affirming value of high stakes, unabashedly teleological grand narratives, even as it upholds the political valency of strident, non-oppositional difference.

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• Introduction: Abiola Irele, critical master, master critic

  Journal of the African Literature Association · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Operations research
  • Genealogy

  The following cluster of articles on the intellectual legacies of Professor Francis Abiola Irele (1936-2017) started as contributions to a memorial seminar during the 44th annual meeting and confer...

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• Could anything under the sky be truly new?

  Journal of the African Literature Association · 2019-05-04

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Panegyric

  New Literary History · 2019-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Panegyric Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ (bio) In "To the King's Most Excellent Majesty" (1768), Phillis Wheatley commemorated George III thus after the repealing of the Stamp Act: Your subjects hope, dread Sire—The crown upon your brows may flourish long,And that your arm may in your God be strong!O may your sceptre num'rous nations sway,And all with love and readiness obey!1 No Nigerian literate in English language would miss the similarities between keywords in this poem and formulaic epithets commonly found in the praise poetry of kings and paramount chiefs.2 "The crown upon your brows may flourish long" translates almost word for word the Yorùbá phrase, "kádé pẹ̀ lórí ọba." Wheatley's prayer "may your sceptre num'rous nations sway" is a near exact English language rendition of "ẹ̀rùjẹ̀jẹ̀ ní gbogbo ilẹ̀kílẹ̀." It would be clear as day to Nigerians that the sovereign portrayed in this poem ranks next to the divinities: "alàṣẹ, èkejì òrìṣà." Every other praise epithet in this poem could be paired up with equivalent fragments of praise in South African izibongo or Nigerian oríkì poems, be they in Zulu, Yorùbá, or English. The lines focus on the king's emblematic embodiments of the strength of the state: the crown, the sceptre, the arm, the visage. The obvious direction of the address is upward from a grateful, lowly subject to the deservedly enthroned mighty. The final stress in each line falls, except in the last line, on a monosyllabic word that prays for an enduring tenure for the crown's wearer. Panegyrics are a type of poetic verbal art whose performance (or reading) positions subjects of praise as exemplary embodiments of the most desirable social ideals. The compositions are defined less by metrical formulas and more by the conventions that specific societies and circumstances expect of the listener (or the reader). A panegyric could be a ballad, a sonnet, a prayer, an elegy, a eulogy, an invective, an anthem, or even a malediction. It could be as full as an epic performance, as brief as an appellation, as disinterested as an ode to the liquid beauty of a [End Page 335] leaping duiker in the savannah, or as tendentious as an advertisement. Panegyrics isolate attributes, persons, institutions, ideas, or objects for direct or indirect adulation in order to create in the saluted a disposition for the fulfillment of a wish, which has been sought by the private or social interests for which the praise singer speaks. The typical panegyric will extoll the accomplishment of extraordinary deeds, or of ordinary deeds skillfully executed, as well as the great advantages that such acts have brought to all concerned. The panegyric's goal of persuasion can be pursued with exaggeration, diminution, or even imprecation. While locations of praiseworthy acts may be emphasized, the precise time of their occurrence is rarely specified because timelessness carries more value in a panegyric. Accomplished panegyrists distinguish themselves with the sharpness of the singularity they attach to the subject of praise with striking poetry. In its ideal realization, the response expected from the intended audience—prideful identification, recognition, generous renumeration, and patronage—is usually punctual. Wishes will be granted, ready fighters will rush to battle for the nation, the performer or poet's material needs will be satisfied, a lover will shower affection on the beloved. In chronicles of English language poetic forms, the panegyric ceased to be important to critical reckoning in the early 1700s, although writers continued to compose occasional poems or praise of personalities. According to J. A. Burrow, "Homer and Pindar were early masters of the poetry of praise, many varieties of which were to flourish throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in panegyrics, hymns, epics, romances, love lyrics, elegies, saints' lives, allegories and the like. Since that time—since the seventeenth century—the poetry of praise has generally been on the retreat in England as elsewhere."3 Burrow's summary concludes that unironic eulogistic writing embarrasses modern poetic tastes. The permanent shift that began in the 1700s is believed to have been caused by "deepseated changes in...

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Frequent coauthors

• Henry Louis Gates

  1 shared

• Natasha Barnes

  1 shared

• Elleke Boehmer

  1 shared

• Susan Z. Andrade

  1 shared

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

  1 shared

• Paul Tiyambe Železa

  United States International University Africa

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• President of the African Literature Association
• Director of the Abiola Irele Seminar in Theory & Criticism a…