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Palgrave Macmillan

African Battle Traditions of Insult

Verbal Arts, Song-Poetry, and Performance

  • Book
  • © 2023

Overview

Editors:
  1. Tanure Ojaide

    1. Department of Africana Studies, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, USA

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  • Explores the “battles” of words, songs, poetry, and performance in Africa and the African Diaspora
  • Shows the evolution of these Africana verbal arts across a broad historical and geographical sweep
  • Highlights contemporary manifestations of this traditional genre, such as battle rap and other popular African music

Part of the book series: African Histories and Modernities (AHAM)

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Table of contents (17 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
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  2. Introduction

    • Tanure Ojaide
    Pages 1-14
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Keywords

About this book

This book explores the “battles” of words, songs, poetry, and performance in Africa and the African Diaspora. These are usually highly competitive, artistic contests in which rival parties duel for supremacy in poetry composition and/or its performance. This volume covers the history of this battle tradition, from its origins in Africa, especially the udje and halo of the Urhobo and Ewe respectively, to its transportation to the Americas and the Caribbean region during the Atlantic slave trade period, and its modern and contemporary manifestations as battle rap or other forms of popular music in Africa. Almost everywhere there are contemporary manifestations of the more traditional, older genres. The book is thus made up of studies of contests in which rivals duel for supremacy in verbal arts, song-poetry, and performance as they display their wit, sense of humor, and poetic expertise. 

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Africana Studies, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, USA

    Tanure Ojaide

About the editor

Tanure Ojaide is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. Educated at Ibadan and Syracuse, Tanure Ojaide has published twenty-one collections of poetry, as well as novels, short stories, memoirs, and scholarly work. He has won the ANA Poetry Prize four times: 1988, 1994, 2003, and 2011. His other awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region, the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry, and the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award. In 2016 he won both the African Literature Association’s Folon-Nichols Award for Excellence in Writing and the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for the Humanities. In 2018 he co-won the Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. He has won the National Endowment for the Arts grant, twice the Fulbright, and twice the Carnegie African Diaspora Program fellowship.

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