Toyin Falola’s astounding intellectual production must be one of the mysteries in the intellectual world. It has transcended the confined world of historical research into broader horizons that include the role of the public intellectual. The present study would undertake a rigorous analysis of the origins, continuities and discontinuities of this transformation. This means we have to recast the debates regarding who is a public intellectual from a multiplicity of discursive situations and historical and cultural contexts. We have to employ methodological parallels from North Atlantic intellectual traditions. How did the role of the public intellectual emerge in the first place in world intellectual history? Addressing this question would enrich this research endeavour immensely.
In interrogating comparative discursive formations, we shall re-evaluate the roles, functions and achievements of continental intellectuals such as Betrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Wole Soyinka and Pierre Bourdieu. Again, this discursive element will give this study a global appeal and range.

Sanya Osha holds a PhD in Philosophy and taught the discipline in Nigerian universities for a decade. He has published extensively on anthropology, cultural studies, knowledge systems of Africa, the politics of the West African region, and the sociopolitical and cultural realities of Southern Africa. He has undertaken extensive research on the discursive status of African systems of knowledge. He also spent a decade studying and teaching the sociological and political aspects of innovations studies. As an academic, he has held research positions at Smith College in the USA, the University of Groningen and the African Studies Centre in the Netherlands, and in South Africa at the Universities of Kwa-Zulu-Natal, University of South Africa, and the Africa Institute for South Africa (AISA). He has also delivered lectures at University of Johannesburg and Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

Some of his publications include, Kwasi Wiredu: The Text, Writing and Thought in Africa (2005), Postethnophilosophy (2011), African Postcolonial Modernity: Informal Subjectivities and the Democratic Consensus (2014), Dani Nabudere’s Afrikology: A Quest for African Holism (2018) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (Expanded Edition): Politics, Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement (2021).

Anthem Africology Series