2019 LSA DISTINGUISHED
SCHOLAR AWARD: JONATHAN HAYNES (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND FILM STUDIES, LONG
ISLAND UNIVERSITY, USA)
It is indeed my
pleasure and honor to nominate Professor Jonathan Haynes of Long Island
University, New York as the LSA Distinguished Scholar for 2019. I have known
Prof Haynes for eighteen years and I know of no other Africanist scholar who is
deserving of this prestigious award than him. Not only has Prof Haynes been a
consummate scholar of African literatures and cultures for the past twenty
years, in those two decades, he has been an incredibly gracious and generous
mentor, ally, advocate, and guardian to many Africanist scholars in the
humanities.
Prof. Haynes’
research work in African literature and cinema marks him out as a scholar of
towering international reputation whose persistence of scholarly inquiry into
African modes of self-expression has secured legitimation for a field of study
now known globally as Nollywood studies. To get a sense of Haynes’s scholarly
achievements, it is important to remember that only a few years ago, Nollywood
was a film industry scoffed at by mainstream cinema directors and elite
scholars in the humanities. With his longtime friend and research associate,
Prof. Onoookome Okome, Prof Haynes worked tirelessly to make sense of the
artistic worth of Nigerian video films and to defend the legitimacy of the
industry as a remarkable mode of African self-expression worthy of critical
attention. Today, Nollywood it is at the centre of scholarly inquiries in
prestigious scholarly fields such as Media Studies, Popular Culture, Film
Studies, Anthropology, English and Cultural Studies, History, Linguistics, and
other disciplines in the humanities.
Haynes’s scholarship on
African literature and cinema is not the typical account of African misery so
prevalent in Africanist scholarship. It is rather an account of stunning social
and cultural change in Africa. Here is what he tells us about Nigeria’s current
economy: “Nigeria is indeed changing fast. The economy has been growing at
nearly 7 percent a year for a decade—not quite a Chinese rate, but truly
impressive. The telecommunications sector is the largest in Africa and one of
the fastest growing in the world. In 1999, less than 1 percent of the
population had access to a telephone; now there are 116 million active cell
phone subscriptions. Forty-seven million Nigerians are on the internet, more
than in France” (Nollywood 301). This is not the record of a nation in misery; it is a
fabulous story that shows irrefutable evidence of social change, innovation,
creativity, and resilience, all happening in the face of near insurmountable
odds against a people and their culture. What Haynes’ work uncovers about
Nigeria is an incredible history of a dynamic nation constantly in the process
of reinventing itself, and doing so in the face of near impossible conditions
of survival mostly brought about by a mean global neoliberal political-economic
order and the crass idiocy and ineptitude of African ruling elites. What his
body of work on Nollywood unravels is significant, for not only does it tell us
that there’s more to come from this modest film industry built by the hard
work, creativity, patience, and dedication of ordinary people, but that the
creative power of a disempowered people, however feeble, should never be
underestimated!
As a pioneer in Nollywood
studies, what Prof Haynes has achieved in African studies is truly remarkable
and unprecedented, for very few people who invented a discipline still live
amongst us in flesh and blood. Prof Haynes and other Nollywood pioneers
literally picked up the art and stories of ordinary people in West Africa from
the streets, traced their social sources, made sense of their narrative logic,
mapped out their aesthetic coordinates, theorized their cultural and
philosophical foundations, and convinced the global academic community that
Nollywood films deserve scrutiny because they hold the secrets of contemporary
postcolonial life in Africa. The particular claim Haynes makes about Nollywood
is powerful: “Nollywood deserves credit for its roles as a chronicler of social
history, as an organ of cultural and moral response to the extreme provocations
and dislocations of contemporary Nigeria, and as the bearer of a true
nationalism. It arose in Nigeria’s hour of need, when everything was crumbling,
including the ideologies on which the state was based” (2016, xxviii). If this
claim he makes about Nollywood is remarkable, what is even more astonishing is
the extraordinary ways in which his work marks him out as a public
intellectual, that kind advocated by Antonia Gramsci in his “philosophy of
praxis”. In advocating for a powerful social role for what he called “the
organic intellectual,” Gramsci made clear the moral responsibility of
intellectuals to stand with and for the people and work not just as a part of
the collective of “organizers of culture,” but to rescue the downtrodden from
being trampled by the dominant and powerful. While everyone else dismissed
Nollywood as a tacky genre invented by uneducated and unemployed urban youth
seeking avenues to quick wealth, Haynes stood with the young Nollywood
artisans, insisting that there was something in their films; that the films
narrativized something crucial and meaningful, and that we needed only to pay
attention to the unique cultural logic of the artists and their iconoclastic
films. And by standing with the people, rather than the traditional elites in
world cinema and African studies, Haynes demonstrated convincingly how
Nollywood films functioned as alternative cultural texts that manage, in spite
of the enormous odds against the industry, to “stage debates about fundamental
issues” and the extraordinary work it does to sustain “an image of the nation
as resilient, grounded, tolerant, plural, certainly tormented and suffering but
also managing to laugh and to get on with life” (xxviii).
With five books, an
edited journal and about three dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters,
and a thirty-year teaching experience in prestigious institutions in the United
States, Germany, and African universities such as the University of Kumasi,
Ghana (where he was the founding director of the West African Center of the
Friends World Program from 2001-2002; the American University in Cairo (Egypt);
the University of Nigeria-Nsukka; Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria; and the
University of Ibadan, Prof. Haynes’ scholarly profile clearly puts him in the
class of star scholars and trailblazers. His phenomenally insightful research
on what African popular arts tell us about bustling and innovative African
cities such as Lagos, is particularly salient to the Lagos Studies Association.
Through his perceptive analysis of city life in Nollywood films, Haynes was
perhaps one of the first wave of Africanists to reveal how African literature,
film, and arts in general essentially function as social maps of Africa’s
complex but fascinating urban cultural life.
It is on the basis of this
remarkable academic record as a teacher, researcher, advocate, and promoter of
African literatures and cultures that I nominate Prof Haynes as the 2019 LSA
Distinguished Scholar of the year. The award will be an incredible mark of
respect for a man who has not only given so much to Africa, but who has also
given a lot of Africa to the world.
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