Search Results - Jeyifo, Biodun

Biodun Jeyifo

Biodun Jeyifo (5 January 1946 – 11 February 2026) was a Nigerian academic, critic, public intellectual, cultural theorist and a specialist in world Anglophone literature and culture.

Jeyifo attained great prominence in African intellectual circles and transcontinental circuits of academia for his analyses of capitalist modernity and its social and cultural crises. It has been said of him [that] "No other scholar, apart from Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, is more attentive to the radically dispersed accents or strands of thinking the post-colonial the way BJ has done."

He was generally regarded as the world's preeminent scholarly authority on the works and career of Wole Soyinka. His award-winning book on the 1986 Nobel laureate, ''Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism'' (Cambridge University Press, 2004), is regarded as the most comprehensive study of the author's work, and the most sophisticated single author study of any writer in African postcolonial studies. While the leading scholars and critics of Soyinka's works took the view that the difficulties and complexities in the Nigerian writer's body of work were either merely self-constitutive or wilfully obscurantist, in this book and other books and essays on Soyinka's writings, Jeyifo based his analysis on the premise that modernist and avant-gardist techniques and language were at the heart of the alleged difficulties and complexities. The book is notable for its detailed readings of Soyinka's greatest works of drama, poetry and fictional and nonfiction prose, combining intellectual rigour with sheer writing pleasure in his explications. Provided by Wikipedia