Her scholarship is animated by a string of towering anticolonial figures whose influence also marked the intellectual universe from which Biodun Jeyifo emerged: I will chose to mention only three here: CLR James, Mahatma Gandhi and Frantz Fanon. From Gandhi, she draws an enduring concern with ethical politics, disciplined dissent, and mass mobilisation as a democratic force. CLR James’ influence came by modelling a form of scholarship in which historical rigour is inseparable from political commitment, and in which mass struggle is treated as a generative force in democratic thought.
It is both an honour and a source of genuine intellectual pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker at this special convocation marking the 80th birthday of Biodun Jeyifo — a scholar whose life and work have shaped critical thought in Nigeria, Africa, and the wider world. In celebrating Professor Jeyifo, we celebrate not only an individual, but a tradition: the Ife–Ibadan school of critical humanism, rigorous Marxian analysis, and fearless engagement with literature as a site of political struggle.
Those of us formed within that tradition know what it means to speak of BJ — as teacher, mentor, comrade, and exemplar. From Ife to Ibadan, and later across the Atlantic, his classrooms were never merely pedagogical spaces; they were workshops of critical consciousness, where theory met history, and literature was inseparable from the demands of justice. His influence endures not only in texts and debates, but in the generations of scholars he mentored and inspired.
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It is therefore entirely fitting that our keynote speaker today is Priyamvada Gopal, professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge, who has travelled from Bengaluru, India, to be with us. We are deeply grateful to her for accepting our invitation, especially at this early moment in the new year, and for lending her voice and presence to this celebration of an extraordinary intellectual life.
Among the many students mentored by Professor Jeyifo during his final decade at Cornell University, Professor Gopal stands out for her exceptional capacity to forge connections between rigorous theory and consequential political realities. Under BJ’s tutelage, she absorbed a tradition of criticism that insists on historical seriousness, ethical clarity, and intellectual courage. Yet, as anyone who has followed her trajectory will readily attest, she has long since struck out on her own, emerging as a powerful beacon for a new generation of scholar-activists across the world.
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Professor Gopal’s intellectual formation — shaped by a transnational upbringing in a family of diplomats, and by education in India and the United Kingdom — has endowed her with a deeply comparative sensibility and an unstinting commitment to inclusivity. She is, in the fullest sense, a postcolonial scholar — one for whom postcolonial studies never loses the political and historical weight that occasioned its emergence. Her work insists that empire cannot be relegated to the past, and that democracy cannot be understood without reckoning with the struggles that shaped it.
In celebrating Biodun Jeyifo at eighty, and reflecting on Fanon at one hundred, there could be no more appropriate keynote voice than that of Priyamvada Gopal: a scholar whose work exemplifies the enduring power of criticism aligned with freedom, history, and struggle.
Her scholarship is animated by a string of towering anticolonial figures whose influence also marked the intellectual universe from which Biodun Jeyifo emerged: I will chose to mention only three here: CLR James, Mahatma Gandhi and Frantz Fanon. From Gandhi, she draws an enduring concern with ethical politics, disciplined dissent, and mass mobilisation as a democratic force. CLR James’ influence came by modelling a form of scholarship in which historical rigour is inseparable from political commitment, and in which mass struggle is treated as a generative force in democratic thought.
From James, Professor Gopal inherits the conviction that intellectual work must remain accountable to popular movements and that theory attains its fullest meaning when aligned with the lived struggles of oppressed peoples. From Fanon — whose centenary we commemorate this year — she inherits an uncompromising insistence on confronting the material, psychological, and epistemic violences of colonialism, and on recognising decolonisation as an unfinished, unsettling project.
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These influences find powerful expression in her landmark book, Insurgent Empire, which takes the agency of colonised peoples as its point of departure and, in so doing, overturns imperial histories that cast them merely as victims. The book demonstrates how anticolonial resistance reshaped democratic thought at the imperial centre itself — an argument that resonates deeply with Nigeria’s own histories of labour movements, student radicalism, pro-democracy struggle, and contemporary civic activism.
Professor Gopal is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and of the Royal Society of Literature, and was most recently a resident fellow at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study. Her earlier books include Literary Radicalism in India (2005) and The Indian English Novel (2009). She is currently completing a major project titled “Decolonization: The Life and Times of an Idea”, from which her lecture today — “Who Is Afraid of Decolonization? Reflections on Particular Pasts and Planetary Futures” — is drawn.
In celebrating Biodun Jeyifo at eighty, and reflecting on Fanon at one hundred, there could be no more appropriate keynote voice than that of Priyamvada Gopal: a scholar whose work exemplifies the enduring power of criticism aligned with freedom, history, and struggle.
Dapo Olorunyomi is the Publisher of PREMIUM TIMES and the Chief Executive officer at Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), Nigeria.
This is the text of the introduction of Professor Priyamvada Gopal at the Biodun Jeyifo at 80 celebrations at MUSON Centre, Lagos on the 5th of January.
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