This dissertation is based on ethnographic research on the performance of life ceremonies among Yoruba migrants living in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. It focuses on child naming, marriage, and landmark birthday celebrations in which I have participated between 2006 and 2…
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African Americans have historically turned to African philosophy and practice as a way of shaping and enhancing their artistic work. From the use of a generic African setting as a backdrop to Bert Williams' and George Walker's turn-of-the-century musicals, to the careful anthrop…
This is an ethnography of the Nike Centre for Art and Culture (NCAC) located in Osogbo, Nigeria. In 1983 Oyenike Monica Omoye Ojo Twins Seven Seven Olaniyi Davies-Okundaye, better known as Nike and already internationally known for her batik art work, established the centre to t…
In the Yoruba-speaking Shabe region which spans the border of the Republic of Benin and Nigeria, the changing historical constraints and political economy of the borderland intersect with constructions of identity and ideologies of gender in complex ways. Informal trade across t…
For the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, aesthetics is inextricable from ethics. But the objects that have been discussed under the privileged banner of Yoruba art history can not contend with the full range of Yoruba aesthetic practice. In Yoruba culture the beautiful obj…
This dissertation examines a type of complex verb formation known as the serial verb construction (SVC) in Yorùbá (Nigeria, Benue Congo). For example, Túnjí ti Akin subú. Túnjí push Akin fall (1) ‘Túnjí pushed Akin down.’ A new analysis of the SVC is presented based on Koopman a…
This work focuses on indigenous painting traditions found on ancestral shrines of Yoruba divinities collectively known as orisa in southwestern Nigeria. The devotional activity of orisa painting often enacted in honor and veneration of departed ancestors for healing, empowerment…
This dissertation investigates the installation of prosodic constituents, from the level of the prosodic word to the mora, in several Benue-Congo languages spoken in Nigeria, Togo, and the Republic of Benin. The cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic diversities exhibited in the l…
This work argues that Yoruba oral society is a culturally plural society and compares its features to some multicultural patterns of New World societies, using Canada and the United States as examples. The thrust of the thesis is that despite colonial and neo-colonial influences…
This study examines the effects of colonial social policies and of Christian conversion on the local political authority of Bunu Yoruba women and men of central Nigeria. It complements previous studies of colonialism and gender relations and political power in Africa, which have…
This study aims to define the formal and ideological limits of the narrative mode known as "marvelous realism." It consists of a comparative analysis of the major works of three novelists belonging to different literary traditions. These authors are the Cuban, Alejo Carpentier, …
This thesis asks the question whether and to what extent Osun in the New World is the same as the Osun of the Old World. My argument is that the selected Yoruba myths studied in this dissertation prove that Osun in the Old and the New Worlds is the same divinity as the Osun of t…
African art and spirituality are inseparable. Looking at it specifically from the visible, concrete, or tangible standpoint, the latter is nonexistent without the former, as the presence of the former validates the reality of the latter. The origin of this symbiotic relationship…
In this dissertation I explore religion and music as key sites through which members of the shrinking Yoruba middle class (re)negotiate their positions in a contemporary Nigerian society that is characterized by democratic transition and economic liberalization. Based on two yea…
In this dissertation, I demonstrate that a clear understanding of the properties and behaviors of personal pronouns and operators resolves some of the puzzles surrounding UG phenomena such as question formation, superiority effects, weak crossover effects, resumption, and the de…
The thesis focuses on how well suited lifestyle patterns are to different spatial types currently existing in the domestic architecture of the Yoruba people of South Western Nigeria, and on meanings underlying space use, in traditional and contemporary housing. Changes in Yoruba…
This research investigated the use of social capital by Nigerian Yoruba immigrant parents and its relevance to the educational performance of their children. The research question was: What is the role of social capital in the educational performance of Nigerian immigrant childr…