The Yoruba: A New History is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent. Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, Ogundiran examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History offers an intriguing cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history from ca. 300 BC to 1840. It accounts for the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different junctures of time. The result is a new framework for understanding the Yoruba past and present.

The Yoruba was one of the most important civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa. While the high quality and range of its artistic and material production have long been recognized, the art of the Yoruba has been judged primarily according to the standards and principles of Western aesthetics. In this book, which merges the methods of art history, archaeology, and anthropology, Rowland Abiodun offers new insights into Yoruba art and material culture by examining them within the context of the civilization's cultural norms and values and, above all, the Yoruba language. Abiodun draws on his fluency and prodigious knowledge of Yoruba culture and language to dramatically enrich our understanding of Yoruba civilization and its arts. The book includes a companion website with audio clips of the Yoruba language, helping the reader better grasp the integral connection between art and language in Yoruba culture.

Drawing on extensive field research conducted over the course of two decades, Bode Omojola examines traditional and contemporary Yorùbá genres of music. From the primeval age of Ayànàgalú (the Yorùbá pioneer-drummer-turned-deity-of-drumming) to the modern era, Yorùbá musical traditions have been shaped by individual performers: drummers, dancers, singers, and chanters, wself-mediated visions of their social and cultural environment. Yorùbá Music in the Twentieth Century explores the role of the performer and the performing group in creating these traditions, contributing to the ongoing reorientation of scholarship on African music toward individual creativity within a larger social network. Drawing on extensive field research conducted over the course of two decades, Bode Omojola examines traditional Yorùbá genres such as bàtá and dùndún drumming as well as more contemporary genres such as Yorùbá popular music. The book also addresses a spectrum of social issues, ranging from gender inequality to the impactianity and Islam on Yorùbá musical practice. Throughout, Omojola emphasizes the interrelatedness of the different components of the Yorùbá musical landscape, as well as the role of specific individuals and groups of musicians, whohave continued to draw from indigenous Yorùbá musical resources to create new musical forms in the process of engaging the social dynamics of a rapidly changing environment. Awarded honorable mention in the 2014 Kwabena Nketia Book Competition of the African Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Bode Omojola is a Five College Associate Professor of Music at Mt. Holyoke College.

The text celebrates the academic achievements of Professor Olasope Oyelaran. It brings together over 20 papers by an international group of scholars on African diaspora languages, literatures and culture, representing four generations, all of whom have been influenced by Oyelaran’s work in one way or another. Edited by three African scholars in the USA, UK, and Nigeria, the volume presents current research on topics in applied- and socio-linguistics, phonology, morphology, syntax, oral and written literature, and Yoruba language and culture in African diasporas in Brazil, Cuba, and Trinidad. The constellation of topics presented here will enlarge the reader’s understanding of a number of issues in the field of African and African diaspora languages, literatures, and cultures today. As such, the book makes an important contribution to the expanding work on the linguistic and cultural interface of Africa and its Brazilian, Cuban, and Trinidadian diasporas.

The Landmarks Series is a research and publications outfit funded by the Landmarks Research Foundation to publish recent outstanding doctoral dissertations on any aspect of Nigerian linguistics, languages, literatures and cultures. This study is a departer from most previous work on Yorùbá Grammar in the sense that rather than being purely a descriptive grammar; it attempts to provide a theoretical analysis of the internal and external syntax of Yorùbá nominal expressions using the Chomskyan Principles and Parameters approach to syntax. This Generative theory attempts to characterize the grammar of all natural languages in terms of a set of universal principles that all languages share, and a set of parameters along which languages may vary. The book emphasizes the empirical motivation behind major theoretical proposals in that framework, and shows how views on the nature of universal grammar and cross-linguistic variation have developed over the years as a consequence of a massive increase in cross-linguistic syntactic research.