Faculty Directory
Iyunolu Osagie
Associate Professor of English
Contact:
225 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone: 814-865-0334
ifo1@psu.edu
Office Hours:
Monday 2-3 and Wednesday 2-4
Iyunolu Osagie is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University , where she teaches composition, African and African American literary theories, and Third World women's literatures. Her research focuses on Black diasporic/transnational studies, especially African and African American cultural memories, Third world women's intellectual response to Western feminisms, democracy in South Africa and Nigeria , and the revitalization of the Amistad revolt. Her book, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone ( Athens : University of Georgia Press , 2000), highlights the historical Amistad as contemporary cultural memory. She is a member of the University senate and is active in both departmental and college committees. She is also a member of the Executive Board of the Penn State American Women Writers Workshop. She holds a B. A. and M.A. from the University of Ife, Nigeria, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University .
Publications
Books:
The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the US and Sierra Leone ( University of Georgia Press , August 2000).
Articles :
"Is Morrison Also Among the Prophets? ‘Psychoanalytic' Strategies in Beloved " African American Review 28.3 (Fall 1994): 423 - 440.
"Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness: The Amistad Revolt Revisited in Sierra Leone ," Massachusetts Review (Spring 1997): 63-83.
“The Amistad Affair and the Nation of Sierra Leone : The Dramatic Return of Memory,” Contemporary Literature in the African Diaspora . Edited by Olga Barrios & Bernard W. Bell (University of Salamanca, Spain, 1997) 159 - 165.
“The Life/Writings of Bessie Head,” in African Literature and Its Times. Edited by Joyce Moss ( Santa Monica , CA : Moss Publishing Group, 2000).
“The Amistad Revolt Revisited in Sierra Leone ,” Thresholds of Western Culture: Identity, postcoloniality, transnationalism . Edited by John Burt Foster, Jr. & Wayne J. Froman ( New York : Continuum, 2002) 89-102.
“Routed Passages: Narrative Memory and Identity in Alex Haley's Roots .”
College Language Association 47.4 (June 2004): 391-408.
Book Reviews:
“Femi Euba,” Post-Colonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook , edited by Pushpa N. Parekh & Siga Jagne (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998): 164 - 170.
"Chap Am So: The Amistad Victory" by John C. Thorpe, Theatre Journal 50.1 ( March 1998): 101- 103.
Masters of the Drum , Robert Fox. (Greenwood Press, 1995). Melus 23.4 (Winter 1998): 219-222.
The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolt and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity , Maggie Sale. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). CLA Journal 42.1 (Sept 1998): 124-28.
Work in Progress:
African Memories: Slavery and its Rhetorical Present (book project)
The Shield: Memories of Civil War in Sierra Leone (play)
Theater in Sierra Leone : Plays from 1970-2000 (Edited Collection)
“Modernism and Double Consciousness: Gilroy 's Perspective on DuBoisian Scholarship” (article)
Recent Selected Presentations :2000 April “The Amistad Story in Film,” CLA Conference, Baltimore .
2000 September “Race, Ethnicity and Power Maritime America ,” “Amistad
2001 March “The Amistad in Film,” CAAR Conference, Sardinia Italy .
2002 February, “Historical Memory in Toni Morrison's “Jazzy” Paradise ,” 20th Century Lit. Conference, Louisville , KY.
2003 April, “Modernism, Double-Consciousness, and the Black Diaspora,” CLA conference, Washington DC .
2004 April, “The Historical Memory of the Amistad: Spielberg's Movie and the Current African Perspective,” ALA conference, U of Wisconsin-Madison.
2005 April. “Modernism and Double-Consciousness: Gilroy on DuBoisian Scholarship,” CAAR conference, Francois-Rabelais University , Tours , France .
2005 December. “Amistad: Response to Spielberg's Version.” Seminar. Obafemi Awolowo University , Nigeria .
Honors, Grants, and Awards:1991 Cornell Teaching Fellowship
1991-1992 Mellon Dissertation Fellowship
1992 Beatrice Brown Award, Women Studies Program, Cornell
1994 Research and Graduate Studies Grant (Faculty Award), Penn State
[Research: Collective National Memory on the Amistad in Sierra Leone ]
1998 Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, (Faculty Award), Penn State
[Research: Rhetorical Memories of the Slave Trade at Africana Library,
Northwestern University , summer 1998]
Fulbright-Hays Summer Fellowship, Ghana
2005 CIC Academic Leadership Program 2005-2006 (Award)
2006 Research Grant [Africana Research Center and Richards Civil War Center at Penn State Award] for Civil War Research in Sierra Leone
Links to Selected Articles:
Osagie, Iyunolu "Performance Review: Chap Am So: The Amistad Victory"
Theatre Journal - Volume 50, Number 1, March 1998, pp. 101-103
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theatre_journal/v050/50.1pr_thorpe.html
Course Descriptions:
English 597-C: Third World FeminismsThis course will examine different feminist epistemologies that have provided the framework for interpreting the everyday life of Third world women and the overarching social systems that have produced and continue to circumscribe their existence through the tripartite burdens of racial, gender, socio-economic discriminations. We would examine closely the intersection of (post)coloniality and feminism, while reviewing the conflicts that Western imperialistic and linguistic structures foster. Third world feminist scholars are engaged not just with the struggles to liberate all women but also with the production of a discourse of emancipation for all oppressed peoples. Thus the geo-political and economic dislocations engendered by globalization, for example, become moments of strategic intervention for feminist intellectuals.
Required Texts :
E. Burgos-Debray (ed ), I, Rigoberta Menchu
Trinh T.Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other
Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment
Marta Traba, Mothers and Shadows
Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero
Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance & Capitalist Discipline
Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity
C. Mohanty et al Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism
Fatima Mernissi Beyond the Veil
Required Selections from…
Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds
James Clifford, Writing Culture
Ann Leonard, Seeds
Haleh Afshar, Women, Development, and Survival in the Third World
Women's Feature Service, The Power to Change
Honor Ford Smith, Lionheart Gal
English 566: Contemporary African American Drama
This course explores the expressive and performative articulation of history on stage. Although most African American TV plays have generally lined up with the American status quo, the African American stage has particularly been marked by its counter-hegemonic status in American society. By focusing on the cultural practice of drama on the black stage, we will examine themes of conquest and resistance and how the politics of space and location accentuate the dramatic techniques and the cultural forms employed by black playwrights. According to W.E.B. DuBois, black theater should define, inscribe, and authenticate the enduring presence of a culturally black subjectivity. To what extent, then, does the intertextual nature of theater affect the production of a culturally-specific black identity? With both a historical overview and a selection of primary readings, we will examine playwrights such as Angelina Grimke, Owen Dodson, Lorraine Hansberry, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Paul Carter Harrison. How does Black theater today (off and on Broadway) contextualize political and social representations of African Americans? We would hope to answer these questions not just through our class readings but also through engagement with live theater ( Penn State theater? Broadway?).
Honors Seminar, 300H: Reading Black, Reading Feminist
Since Harriett Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ,which chose to address itself particularly to American women and to specify the differences between black and white women under any given material conditions, African American women writers have continually challenged feminism to acknowledge and to explore difference not only in terms of gender but also in terms of class and color. This course will focus on the construction of the female identity in the textual representations of gender, class, color and cultural differences by black women. Writers will include Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adrienne Kennedy, and Octavia Butler. For theoretical focus we will also use bell hooks' Ain't I a Woman , Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood , Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought , Elizabeth Fox Genovese's Within the Plantation Household ,Teresa De Lauretis' Technologies of Gender , Henry Louis Gates' Reading Black, Reading Feminist and Michelle Wallace's When and Where I Enter .
