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Onitsha Market Literature—named after a city east of the Niger River—emerged in the early 1950s. The popular pamphlet style soon spread to other centers throughout the then British colony of Nigeria. These ephemeral publications circulated widely throughout the busy marketplace, and writers intended them to be both educating and entertaining for the common people.
Keynote Reading and Reception
5:00–6:30 P.M., HQ L02/L90
Fiction’s mysteries
Novelists Jonathan Lethem and Catherine Lacey read from their work and discuss the role of fiction in an age of information—and misinformation—with Meghan O’Rourke, editor of The Yale Review.
Reception to Follow
Artists at Work
12:00-1:00 P.M., HQ 134
How do artists make things?
Enjoy lunch with award-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem and photographer and longtime collaborator Gregory Crewdson as they talk about making art together and apart. Moderated by Meghan O’Rourke, editor of The Yale Review.
Part of The Yale Review Festival 2025.
Franke Visiting Fellows
Jennifer Makumbi introduces her forthcoming pan-African novel, Alkebulon: The Lions Return, followed by a reading and discussion.
Civilizations are living things: they are born, they grow and die. Nations too, rise and fall. Europe and its spawned nations are declining. Africa cannot afford to stumble into global power as if drunk.
“Who Shot the Tiger?: Performing Imperialism in India” explores how tiger hunts recur in nineteenth-century British visual culture. Appropriated from Indian courtly tradition, colonial depiction of tiger hunts enforced British imperial power even as the transformation of these objects across time became the Empire’s undoing.
Tracing the emergence of this motif into the English cultural consciousness, questions of the archive’s complicity in imperialism arise. The violence embedded in representations of the hunt is perpetuated by materials held in Yale’s collections.
The Yale College Poets Reading is an annual reading by outstanding undergraduate poets. This year’s readers are: Lukas Bacho, Olivia Bell, Maisie Bilston, Arthur Delon-Vilain, Ethan Estrada, Kavya Jain, Audrey Kim, Jessica Liu, Sam Oguntoyinbo, Madeline Poole, Netanel Schwartz & Lucy TonThat. Co-sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library and the Creative Writing Program of the Yale Department of English.
Friday, April 4, 2025
HQ 131 (320 York Street)
Join us for a symposium on the 50th anniversary of John Ashbery’s volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Free and open to the public.
Schedule:
Mohammed Sadegh Ansari will present his new book The Science of Music: Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond (2025). Introduction by Kevin van Bladel. Response by Giulia Accornero.
A conversation with a co-curator of Beinecke’s current exhibition: Roberta L. Dougherty, Yale Library’s librarian for Middle East studies.
Zoom webinar registration link: https://bit.ly/42J0SjC
Jennifer Rycenga recovers a pioneering example of antiracism and Black-white cooperation. Founded in 1833 by white teacher Prudence Crandall, Canterbury Academy educated more than two dozen Black women during its eighteen-month existence. Racism in eastern Connecticut forced the teen students to walk a gauntlet of taunts, threats, and legal action to pursue their studies, but the school of higher learning flourished until a vigilante attack destroyed the Academy.
Zoom webinar registration link: https://bit.ly/42Nm6N5
