Bibi Bakare-Yusuf

Nigerian academic, writer and editor from Lagos, Nigeria.

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf Hon. FRSL (born 1970) is a Nigerian academic, writer and editor from Lagos, Nigeria. She is the co-founder of the publishing company Cassava Republic Press in 2006 in Abuja. Bakare-Yusuf was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019, as well as having been selected as a Yale World Fellow, a Desmond Tutu Fellow and a Frankfurt Book Fair Fellow.

Quotes edit

  • It is not enough for us to say we must tell our own stories if we don’t equally think or talk about the enabling infrastructure that supports the generation of those stories, the infrastructure that enables the circulation of ideas and the flow of knowledge.
  • It is also through books that some of the most enduring and pernicious images about Africa and black people persist. Yet, books also have a redemptive potential and plenitude. It is through books that we come to learn and read about each other as Africans across our differences and continue to have a reason to gather...
    • [1] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaks about Books.
  • The African literary space is most likely the only artifact of culture in this neo-colonial moment that has yet to cut loose from its colonial mooring.
    • [2] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaks about how African literature is still copied from the West.
  • What I am interested in is how we create what I am calling the African archival future which will then form part of a global archive. Publishing for me is therefore essentially the work of archival creation and a potential tool of power and control, a tool that helps to shape how we view ourselves and make sense of the world.
  • We need to produce our own data in awesome, saturating quantities so that our own archives come to drown out the noise and the interpretive bias of the excessively confident outsiders who have little regard for our multi-tongued, polyrhythmic, polytheistic and metaphysical horizon.
    • [3] Bibi Bakare-Yusuf speaking about the completely inaccurate representation of our culture by outsiders.
  • Digital innovation is likely to have an even stronger impact across Africa than in the West, simply because of the historic lack of access to books... Digital innovation is allowing us to build our audience base through social media. And because we have a single platform for markets —Nigeria and the rest of the world–audiences are able to interact, connect and engage each other in a way that they would not have previously done.
    • [4] Bibi Bakare speaking about the impact of technology on easing the business of publishing and circulating books.
  • ...In the age of new socializing media, who can deny that a book as a material object is infinitely richer and more meaningful than any of the arts? This is because, through the thick description they enable, all the other artifacts of civilization (music, fine arts, film, science, etc) can be folded and compressed into that singular object. In the book, worlds, cultures, emotions, and habits of being are collected, dissected, and revealed to us so that we can have different voices to converse with, in that quiet moment of aloneness or to whip out to stimulate debate, dialogue, or foment a revolution.
    • [5] Bibi-Bakare on archives and publishing books.

External links edit

 
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