Speakers: Tolulope Adelabu, Elaine Sullivan, Kimberly Rooney (in order of appearance on image, left to right)
Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CST
Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
This in-person event will be livestreamed (Click here to Zoom in)
Talk Description
The Speakers will discuss the student led collaborative work in organizing an exhibition (Dec 16 – February 28, Memorial Library) that foregrounds the often-neglected visual artistic labor that accompanied literary texts published in the early postcolonial period in East and West Africa. Featuring works such as Uche Okeke’s illustrations for Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the exhibition reveals how visual artists and writers collaboratively reimagined Africa, particularly in Nigeria and neighboring communities and countries, during the transition from colonial rule and to independence. Drawing on syncretic encounters between African and Western aesthetic codes, these illustrations map socio-political relations in ways that unsettle dominant modernist, realist, and anthropological images of Africa.
Some of these works are in UW–Madison’s Memorial Library, situating the university as a partner in the global preservation of African cultural history and other marginal forms. Among the holdings are short stories and novels from influential series such as the African Reader’s Library and the African Writers Series. The exhibition also spotlights featured illustrators with publications documenting their craft and recent versions of literary illustrations — from new cover designs to digital animations.
African art and literature have long garnered significant global attention, shaping and dialoguing with major intellectual movements from modernism to futurism. Yet what remains underexamined is how exhibition and scholarly practices frequently isolate these two aesthetic forms or assign one a subservient role to the other. Illustrations and cover art often accompanied texts in early African print culture from the 1950s through the 1980s. While some, often colonial literacy projects, infantilized African subjects, others refashioned illustrations as a site of anticolonial critique, modernist experimentation, and cultural negotiation.
This talk will explore how African cultural productions have been credited and discredited, preserved and transformed — and how African artists continue to shape the syncretic future of cultural and content creation.
Speakers Bios
Tolulope Adelabu is a PhD student in the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research connects children’s media, visual culture, and futurist literature to examine creativity under constraint. She studies how Africans have historically imagined futures through low-tech, playful, and collaborative media, and how these practices inform contemporary debates about knowledge production, authorship, circulation, automation, and emerging information systems. She has an extensive multidisciplinary professional and academic background in information, literary, language, and education studies. She earned a Master of Library and Information Studies degree at UW-Madison and a joint honors master’s in English literature and education at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.
Elaine Sullivan is an assistant professor of African Cultural Studies and Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of the arts of Africa, concentrating on Central African art histories and critical museum studies. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary arts from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and their display in museums around the world, especially at Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa. Prior to joining UW-Madison, she held positions at the University of Johannesburg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Kimberly Rooney is the Africana and Francophone Studies Librarian at UW-Madison Libraries. She received her PhD from the UW-Madison Department of French and Italian in 2024. Her dissertation draws on concepts of decolonial praxis, postcolonial theory, childhood studies, and critical pedagogy to interrogate the school and its representations in sub-Saharan African French-language literature. She is also an educator of language, literature, and culture of the French-speaking world. Now, as a member of the International and Area Studies Library Unit, she supports Africanist and global French-language educators and researchers on campus and throughout the community and curates African and Francophone Studies collections for UW-Madison Libraries.
The event is free and open to the public.