Perhaps it could be argued with a fair amount of certainty that no other scholar has championed the study of African oral literature and performance more than Isidore Okpewho. From his initial seminal argument that the epic and myth existed in Africa and has echoes in modern African literature and politics to the contemporary explorations of the transformations in African expressive forms in the Black Diaspora, Okpewho has been [and remains] at the very hub of those discourses, unravelling, shaping and provoking new debates around orality and African literary and performative forms. So robust and all-embracing has been Okpewho's commitment to the study of oral performance in Africa and beyond; even informing his engagement with the art of modern storytelling through fiction, that his inaugural lecture, entitled "A Portrait of the Artist as a Scholar," may well be regarded as defining the overarching scope of his intellectual productivity in several acclaimed books. The 30th anniversary of the publication of his first influential work, The Epic in Africa (1979) and the approach of his 70th birthday, thus provide an auspicious opportunity to pay tribute to his prodigious career as a scholar and award-winning novelist through a book dedicated to him. Essays are invited from scholars in the fields of Oral Literature, Cultural Studies, African Studies, Popular Culture, Postcolonial Studies, Ethnography, Ethnomusicology, Anthropology, Globalization, and Diaspora Studies for consideration towards the book slated for publication in the second quarter of 2010.
Essentially grounded on the broad theme and working title of the proposed book, Beyond Text: Issues in African Oral Literature and Diaspora Studies, essays for this project are expected to relate to the scholarly and artistic interests that have defined Okpewho's work in the past thirty years. The goal is not to issue a perfunctory festschrift in honour of the Guggenheim Fellow, and former president of the International Society for Oral Literature in Africa (ISOLA), but to publish a volume of essays to promote further interdisciplinary conversation in the study of texts and contexts of oral performance in Africa, orality and African modernities, popular culture, urbanization and Diaspora and Globalization Studies. The editors are interested in research papers which engage a range of new interdisciplinary perspectives in the study of oral literature and its transformations in fiction, popular culture, research methodologies and pedagogies.

Contributors may be guided by (but not limited to) the following themes and sub- themes:

1. Fieldwork and Documentation
a) Oral notation versus Written Notation
b) Technology, research and archiving -- DVD, CDR, Video, CD, Internet, etc.
2. Comparative perspectives: Scholarship in African literature, folklore traditions, and popular culture.
3. Biocritical studies--investigations into the creative personality of the oral artist.
4. Transformations in the text and context of performance:
a) From Village to Stage; from stage to screen and cyberspace: Spoken Word, Urbanization and Globalization
b) Orality and the Media: Film, Mass media -- radio, television, and popular newspapers/magazines.
5. African oral literature, modern African literature and Diaspora Studies: fiction, poetry, and drama.
6. Africa's postcolonial crisis and oral narratives/ modern African fiction.
Submission guidelines:
Interested scholars should submit an abstract of no more than 300 words with the following:
- title of paper
- full name of author
- affiliation
- mailing address
- e-mail address
- telephone and fax number(s)
- a biodata of not more than 50 words highlighting one or two major publication(s) where applicable.

Deadlines:
Submission of Abstract/Proposal: February 28, 2009
Notification of acceptance: March 13, 2009
Deadline for submission of chapters: June 30, 2009
Final deadline for revised chapters: August 30, 2009.

All submissions adhering to the MLA style with a maximum of 10,000 words should be sent electronically to: OkpewhoProject@gmail.com Please send your document in Word 1997 or later, and as an email attachment. You may also direct all inquiries to the same address.

The Editors:

Nduka Otiono
Department of English and Film Studies,
University of Alberta, Canada.
E-mail: otiono@ualberta.ca

Dr. Chiji Akoma
Department of English
Villanova University,
USA. E-mail: chiji.akoma@villanova.edu

Nduka Otiono
Department of English and Film Studies
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta,
Canada, T6G 2E5