THE  DEPARTMENT  OF  ENGLISH,  MCGILL  UNIVERSITY  
PRESENT    

ATO  QUAYSON  
KÒBÒLÒ  POETICS:  AFRICAN  URBAN  SCRIPTS  AND  READING  PUBLICS  

 
 
Abstract:  The  ambiguous  place  of  literacy  in  Africa  raises  fascinating  questions  about  the  reading  publics  
that  have  evolved  on  the  continent.  Reading  in  Africa  has  often  coalesced  around  items  that  fuse  
repertoires  of  a  simultaneous  orality  and  literacy,  such  as  in  funerary  and  obituary  notices,  popular  texts  
drawing  from  oral  performative  traditions,  concert  party  and  film  posters,  and  the  sayings,  slogans  and  
inscriptions  on  walls,  print  cloths,  lorries,  cars,  and  on  various  surfaces  across  the  urban  landscape.    
There  are  two  main  concerns  to  my  lecture,  namely,  to  make  sense  of  the  urban  scripts  that  are  to  be  
encountered  in  sub-­‐Saharan  Africa,  especially  in  the  West  African  sub-­‐region,  and  secondly  to  speculate  
on  a  category  of  reading  public  that  is  co-­‐produced  by  the  urban  processes  of  inscription  and  which  is  
best  understood  from  the  level  of  the  street  as  opposed  to  the  classroom.  
 
Ato  Quayson  is  Professor  of  English  and  inaugural  Director  of  the  Center  for  Diaspora  and  Transnational  
Studies  at  the  University  of  Toronto,  where  he  has  been  since  2005.    Prior  to  that  he  was  a  Reader  in  
Commonwealth  and  Postcolonial  Literature  in  the  English  Faculty,  Fellow  of  Pembroke  College,  and  
Director  of  the  African  Studies  Centre  at  the  University  of  Cambridge.    His  publications  include  Strategic  
Transformations  in  Nigerian  Writing  (1997),  Postcolonialism:  Theory,  Practice  or  Process  (2000),  
Calibrations:  Reading  for  the  Social  (2003),  and  Aesthetic  Nervousness:  Disability  and  the  Crisis  of  
Representation  (2007).    

FRIDAY,  MARCH  19  2010  —  4  P.M.  

McGILL  UNIVERSITY,  ARTS  BUILDING,  ROOM  160