Background
Utitofon Inyang’s work spans 20th century to present-day African and global Black literature and culture. Her research examines literary geographies and worlding practices that underpin African and Afro-diasporic literary archives and cultural forms, theorizes on the textual atlas of black lifeworlds and spotlights the mediation between visual and spatial epistemes in indigenous African thought and the production of space in Black texts and cultures.
Her first monograph, tentatively titled Dis/Placing Diaspora: Trans-indigenous Black Ecologies and Place-making, studies visual cultures, spatial aesthetics and indigenous knowledge systems that introduce alternative space/time crossings into texts by Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Teju Cole and Chimamanda Adichie. Her second book project questions how Black spatial epistemologies and other-than-human environments contribute to our understanding of global diaspora formations and conceptions of futurity in Black science fiction writing.
Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (PLI), Journal of the African Literature Association (JALA) and Kente: Cape Coast Journal of Literature and the Arts. Her poetry has been published in the Maple Tree Literary Supplement. She is the vice-chair of the African Studies Association Emerging Scholars Network.
Inyang earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California Riverside in 2023, and an MA in English Literature from the University of Illorin, Nigeria. She studied for her undergraduate degree at the University of Uyo, Nigeria. She has received fellowships and awards for her scholarship from the Mellon Foundation and the University of California Office of the President.
Recent Publications
- Inyang, Utitofon Ebong. “(In)Sights from Àwòrán: Yorùbá Epistemologies and the Limits of Cartesian Vision in Teju Cole’s Open City.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 2, (2022) 216–236.
- Inyang, Utitofon. "'Transcoded’ Subjectivities': Animate Materiality, Space and Identity in African Women Science Fiction.” Futurism and the African Imagination. Ed. Dike Okoro. Routledge, 2022. 17-31
Education
- PhD, University of California, Riverside
- MA, University of Ilorin, Nigeria
- BA, University of Uyo, Nigeria
Research Interests
- African literatures
- Critical theory
- Global Black studies
- Cultural imaginaries and representation
- Visual cultures
- Diaspora and migration studies
- Digital humanities
Teaching Interests
- African literature
- Black cultural ecologies
- Visual cultures
- African epistemologies
- Diaspora, migration and the environment
- Narrative form and theory