The Toyin Falola Studies Review ( TSFR): Exploring, Mapping and Archiving a Polymathic Odyssey: A Statement by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju and the AI Collective

 

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Constellations of Memory and Achievement: Reading Iconography Around Toyin Falola

Symbols of African achievement gather like stars around the figure of Toyin Falola.

A camel moves across the mental horizon, patient and enduring, evoking the long itineraries of commerce, migration, and knowledge that stitched together the Sahara and the Sahel—routes along which ideas travelled as surely as salt and gold. Nearby rises the Akan Sankofa bird, its head turned backward in deliberate retrospection, teaching that progress is impossible without remembrance, that the past is not a burden but a reservoir. Beyond these, the pyramids of the Giza Plateau loom in austere grandeur, monuments whose engineering brilliance continues to challenge modern explanation, their geometry embodying Africa’s ancient scientific imagination. Completing the constellation is the serene majesty of the Ife head—sculptural sublimity in bronze and terracotta—its sensitive modelling of the human face projecting dignity, interiority, and metaphysical calm.

In the poster for the Toyin Falola at 65 conference, organized by Samuel Oloruntoba, Adeshina Afolayan, and Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, these images may be read as orbiting Falola’s portrait—his likeness placed at the upper right like a guiding star. When conjoined with the covers of his books, added by myself,  the composition becomes more than graphic design: it becomes a cosmogram. The man is framed not merely as an individual scholar but as a nodal point in a vast civilizational network, where memory, movement, architecture, and art converge.

Together, the symbols suggest that Falola’s work performs what the camel, the Sankofa, the pyramids, and the Ife head each signify in their own idioms: journeying across disciplines and geographies, retrieving the past as a compass, constructing enduring intellectual monuments, and sculpting the human face of history with sensitivity and grandeur. 

The poster thus reads like a sky map of African achievement, with Falola positioned not at its center as a solitary figure, but as a luminous participant in a long, collective constellation of knowledge. Symbols of African achievement-the camel evoking journeys of commerce, migration and knowledge, the Akan Sankofa bird looking behind itself in exploring history as a guide to meaning and progress, the pyramids of Egypt, an unparalleled  awesomeness the manner of achieving which are yet unknown even after thousands of years, a majestic Ife head, sculptural sublimities unique in projecting the sensitive grandeur of the human face-constellate around an image of Toyin Falola, as pictures of his books radiate from the visual centre. This montage visually connects his vast scholarly legacy—represented by his writings—to the deep wells of history and culture he so tirelessly explores.

 Abstract

The Toyin Falola Studies Review is a monthly digital periodical dedicated to documenting, summarizing, linking, and critically engaging with all publications by and about the prolific Nigerian historian, polymath, and public intellectual Toyin Falola.

Responding to the extraordinary volume, range, and velocity of Falola’s scholarly and public intellectual output and of works about him, the journal aims to create an accessible archive while fostering sustained critical dialogue around Falola Studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field.

It aspires to track Falola’s near-daily essays, annual book releases, and ongoing initiatives such as the Toyin Falola Interviews, alongside secondary scholarship, tributes, critiques, and media representations of his life and work.

The Review is directed at positioning Falola Studies as an emergent, coherent field within and beyond African Studies—one characterized by interdisciplinary dialogue, centripetal coherence, and centrifugal expansion—while fostering visibility, accessibility, and scholarly debate.

Open to diverse contributions (textual, visual, performative, and multimedia), the Review embraces comprehensive inclusion, including dissenting voices, under a permissive license to encourage broader development of the field.

By combining documentation, review, commentary, and multimedia contributions, the Review serves simultaneously as bibliography, archive, forum, and intellectual map. It seeks not merely to celebrate productivity but to enable analysis, debate, and theoretical development, positioning Falola’s work as a generative matrix for African Studies and broader global knowledge systems.

Published  via the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, blogs and other social social platforms, the Review culminates in an annual compiled volume, aspiring to become an evolving platform for scholars, students, and the public to engage rigorously and creatively with the expanding Falola intellectual universe, offering a dynamic record of evolving knowledge production in African and global humanities.

The central part of this essay is composed entirely by myself. Having asked my AI editorial team-the AI Collective- to improve it,I preferred every aspect of my draft over the options they provided and so I retained them. The abstract, however, is composed by Grok, distilling the main content of the essay.

The cover image montage is an adaptation, by me, of the poster for the Toyin Falola @65 conference,  but its interpretation is an edited version of my own interpretation- a different and much more concise effort at reading the central image than that in my earlier analysis of it at my report on the Toyin Falola @65 Conference- reworked by ChatGPT Go.The reworking was so thorough and so rich, retaining my own contribution in the last paragraph, but fully reworking the rest of the text, I discarded my own draft and used, without any further editing, the version by Chat, except for the last sentence, which comes from DeepSeek. 

Am I overdoing it by insisting on crediting the AI with co-authorship, when, in fact, they are editing aspects of  my own original creation and distilling that creativity? I wonder. I am so moved by the transformative quality of the editing, taking my efforts so far beyond my mental dexterity at the time of writing, that I feel compelled to so recognize their efforts.

 

 

                                             Abstract

The Toyin Falola Studies Review is a monthly digital periodical dedicated to documenting, summarizing, linking, and critically engaging with all publications by and about the prolific Nigerian historian, polymath, and public intellectual Toyin Falola.

Responding to the extraordinary volume, range, and velocity of Falola’s scholarly and public intellectual output and of works about him, the journal aims to create an accessible archive while fostering sustained critical dialogue around Falola Studies as an emerging interdisciplinary field.

It aspires to track Falola’s near-daily essays, annual book releases, and ongoing initiatives such as the Toyin Falola Interviews, alongside secondary scholarship, tributes, critiques, and media representations of his life and work.

The Review is directed at positioning Falola Studies as an emergent, coherent field within and beyond African Studies—one characterized by interdisciplinary dialogue, centripetal coherence, and centrifugal expansion—while fostering visibility, accessibility, and scholarly debate.

Open to diverse contributions (textual, visual, performative, and multimedia), the Review embraces comprehensive inclusion, including dissenting voices, under a permissive license to encourage broader development of the field.

By combining documentation, review, commentary, and multimedia contributions, the Review serves simultaneously as bibliography, archive, forum, and intellectual map. It seeks not merely to celebrate productivity but to enable analysis, debate, and theoretical development, positioning Falola’s work as a generative matrix for African Studies and broader global knowledge systems.

Published  via the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group, blogs and other social social platforms, the Review culminates in an annual compiled volume, aspiring to become an evolving platform for scholars, students, and the public to engage rigorously and creatively with the expanding Falola intellectual universe, offering a dynamic record of evolving knowledge production in African and global humanities.

The central part of this essay is composed entirely by myself. Having asked my AI editorial team-the AI Collective- to improve it,I preferred every aspect of my draft over the options they provided and so I retained them. The abstract, however, is composed by Grok, distilling the main content of the essay.

The cover image montage is an adaptation, by me, of the poster for the Toyin Falola @65 conference,  but its interpretation is an edited version of my own interpretation- a different and much more concise effort at reading the central image than that in my earlier analysis of it at my report on the Toyin Falola @65 Conference- reworked by ChatGPT Go.The reworking was so thorough and so rich, retaining my own contribution in the last paragraph, but fully reworking the rest of the text, I discarded my own draft and used, without any further editing, the version by Chat, except for the last sentence, which comes from DeepSeek. 

Am I overdoing it by insisting on crediting the AI with co-authorship, when, in fact, they are editing aspects of  my own original creation and distilling that creativity? I wonder. I am so moved by the transformative quality of the editing, taking my efforts so far beyond my mental dexterity at the time of writing, that I feel compelled to so recognize their efforts.

 

 

The Toyin Falola Studies Review is a new monthly periodical created to record, link to, sum up and critique everything published by and about the polymathic writer and scholar Toyin Falola in the month of its publication as well as material published before that month.

This periodical is necessitated by the need to 

1. Contribute to maintaining an easily accessible record of Falola's almost daily flow of essay publications and his yearly stream of books and interview series, the Toyin Falola Interviews.

2. The need to study each of these publications and initiatives.

3. The need to record and explore everything published about Falola.

Genesis and Value of this Idea

   Genesis

This idea occurred to me on account of my intention of performing a synchronic- immediate-and diachronic-across time-  mapping and examination of Toyin Falola Studies-work by and about Toyin Falola.

Why not partially formalize this effort, it occurred to me, so as to stamp my understanding of Falola Studies as a field of study, an integrated and coherent body of knowledge, enriched by dialogue with other cognitive structures, constituted as it is by the fruits of such dialogue, a centripetal and centrifugal progression, an outward and inward movement  already demonstrated by publications by and on Falola but perhaps  not yet realized in terms of Falola Studies as an academic field, a body of knowledge from which to approach the scope, the possibilities, of African Studies, as well as being a matrix in relation to the possibilities of  fields within and beyond African Studies that Falola's work addresses.

     Value

What is the value of keeping a monthly record of Falola related publications and other initiatives? What may be gained by studying these creativities? 

The speed and volume of these publications makes the archival process vital. The ideational range of Falola's writings and interview series-the Toyin Falola Interviews- from food to politics, from religion to the arts, as well as of publications about his life and work demonstrates a huge learning opportunity at the cutting edge of discourse in African Studies and its relationship to the global evolution of knowledge about life on Earth,  learning operating in terms of possibilities of assimilation and critique,  of agreement or disagreement with the ideas expressed by the initiatives represented by Falola Studies.

A periodical such as this one could help concretize the development of the field by more solidly positioning its visibility in a manner that clarifies its contours, its shape as defined by its subjects and the strategies through which these subjects are addressed.

Writings about Falola's life and work will always remain relevant but those writings are necessarily outstripped in the details of their content by the relentless  productivity of the  scholar and writer whose work they address, as well as by the constant steam of publications about his work, amplifying the need for more flexible means of recording and engaging with this flow of publications than is enabled by traditional methods.

      Character of the Journal

          Frequency

The full edition of the journal will appear by the end of every month. Mini-editions leading to that full edition may appear on any day of the week within that month. The contents of the mini editions and any new material will constitute the full edition that will appear at month's end.

A book containing the journal's content for the entire year will be published by the end of the year, giving an overview of the year in Falola Studies.

        Publication Platforms

The journal will be purely digital and be published on the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google group published by Toyin Falola, on a dedicated blog, on LinkedIn and on Facebook, platforms that are both easy to use for the writer and the reader  as well as being globally far reaching.

The monthly summations will be published on all those platforms. The mini-editions will likely be restricted to the USAAfrica Dialogues Series Google  group on account of the need to curate my time and energy.

        Academic Identity

The journal will not be peer reviewed or edited by the editor, myself, beyond my editing of my own contributions to the journal, even though the journal is about a scholar whose works are necessarily peer reviewed by his publishers.

This is because my interest is primarily in creating a platform that aggregates all  kinds of publication by and about Falola, the subject matter being the only criterion for inclusion. This approach is valid on account of generating greater visibility for Falola Studies in its coherence, scope and externally directed dialogical value.

As Falola Studies develops, more rigorous criteria for inclusion in such a journal may be developed.

    Contributions to the Journal

The journal will be populated by what I am able to learn about Falola Studies through my own exposure and whatever information others pass to me, as well as by my own writings about Falola. I therefore urge anyone who has anything they would like to share in the journal to send it to me at ovadepojuifa@gmail.com or on WhatsApp at +234 8051439554.

The journal will publish anything  about Falola, including studies that disagree with his ideas and methods. The goal is comprehensive, critical scholarship, not simply celebration. 

      Legal Status of the Journal

 The journal will be published under a licence that enables anyone to use its name and content model in developing other initiatives, profit making or otherwise. This is vital for the further development of Falola Studies as an academic discipline, since the idea animating this journal can be developed in more formal ways in  an academic context.

Original writing in the journal, however, can be used only with the permission of the writer.

     Call for Contributors

Anyone who would like to contribute to the journal with information or original material is welcome. Publications may be verbal, voiced or visual-pictures and video, the video accessed through links to such a platform as You Tube, picture albums through such platforms as Flickr or Google Photos and verbal material linked through such platforms as SoundCloud.

The traditional approach to scholarship is writing. Ready access to various expressive methods and their distinctive communicative force, however, increasingly sees other approaches to scholarly subjects emerging in the public domain.

Falola Studies, for example, includes ''oriki Falola", life narrative verbalizations about Falola, a demonstration of a Yoruba oral poetic genre mapping or spotlighting aspects of a subject, as performed, in relation to Falola, at the recent discussion of Falola's work at the J.Randle Centre in Lagos and at the recent Toyin Falola Conference at Osun Sate University. Oriki may also be written but their most distinctive actualization is in the verbal modulations and possibly bodily gestures of performance,

Falola has also increasingly used images in projecting his ideas, as in his collages of images and verbal text and his employing images in his books, as  recently evident in Global Yoruba: Regional and Diasporic Networks.