Reclaiming The People’s Voice: Special Issue Calls For Papers On Niyi Osundare & Second-Generation African Poetry

THE Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) has announced a special issue dedicated to the towering legacy of Niyi Osundare—poet, critic, activist, and emblematic voice of Africa’s post-independence generation.

Guest-edited by Olabode Ibironke and Tosin Gbogi, the issue—titled “The People’s Word, The World’s Poetics: Niyi Osundare and the Rearticulation of Second-Generation African Poetry”—seeks to reframe scholarly and public attention toward a group of poets whose radical interventions reshaped African literature but remain underappreciated compared to their predecessors.

The Second Generation and Its Margins

Osundare’s contemporaries—Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, Jack Mapanje, Tanure Ojaide, Funso Aiyejina, Syl Cheney-Coker, Ifi Amadiume, and others—emerged in the aftermath of political independence, challenging internal corruption, neocolonial control, and cultural silencing. Unlike the first generation of African poets—Senghor, Okigbo, Soyinka, Clark—whose work is canonized in anticolonial struggles, this second generation fought quieter but no less critical battles: decolonizing literary production itself.

In Osundare’s own words, fidelity to indigenous publishers and newspapers was both a political and poetic choice: “total loyalty to indigenous publishers” was a rejection of multinational houses like Heinemann, which he deemed “active agents in the West’s exploitation of Africa.”

A Global Poetics of Resistance

Osundare’s Yoruba-inflected verse resonates well beyond Nigeria. Like Kamau Brathwaite’s “nation language” or Nicolás Guillén’s Afro-Cuban poetics, his work demonstrates how oral traditions, performance, and local idioms contest the hegemony of colonial literary forms. In this way, Osundare belongs as much to the Black Atlantic as to Africa—his poetry engaging with questions of circulation, world literature, and alternative modernities.

The special issue seeks to spotlight these transoceanic resonances, positioning Osundare alongside Caribbean and South American poets who also bent language to the rhythms of their people.

Rethinking the People’s Poet

Beyond generational framing, the editors invite essays on Osundare’s eco-poetics, geocritical mappings of Yoruba landscapes, gender questions in his verse, and the underexamined philosophy of the poet embedded in his activism. His performative style and oral aesthetics, too, prefigure Nigeria’s contemporary spoken-word scene.

Comparative and interdisciplinary work is encouraged: How does Osundare’s newspaper column-poetry anticipate today’s social media immediacy? What can archives, translation studies, or documentary film (such as The Poets) reveal about his layered legacy?

Submission Details

• Abstracts (300 words max): 15 December 2025

• Notification of acceptance: 15 February 2026

• Full papers (7,000–8,000 words): 15 August 2026

• Anticipated publication: early 2027

Submissions should follow MLA 8th edition and JALA guidelines. Authors must submit two versions (with and without identifying details) to:

• Olabode Ibironke (oi26@rutgers.edu)

• Tosin Gbogi (gbogi001@umn.edu)
  Subject line: “JALA – Niyi Osundare Special Issue”
  cc: Dr Olanike Olaleru

This issue promises not just to celebrate Osundare’s towering contributions, but also to reclaim the broader second generation of African poets as central architects of Africa’s cultural self-definition and world literary modernity.