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55 Aiyejina deploys the personal ties he has developed in the Caribbean as organising metaphors for the relationship between Africa and the Caribbean and the role that an aware- ness of ancestry can play in the development of the two regions. In both his academic and literary outputs he demon- strates that no narrative of Africa can be complete without a referencing of her Diaspora just as no narrative of the Diaspora can be complete without a backward glance to its origins. He has published widely on African and West Indian literature and culture including essays and reviews on Brathwaite VS Reid Denis Williams George Lamming Wole Soyinka Christopher Okigbo Mabel Segun Odia Ofeimun and Niyi Osundare. He has also theorised on Nigerian poetry with his 1988 landmark analysis Recent Nigerian poetry in English An alternative Tradition. He is the leading scholar on the works of Earl Lovelace and has advanced the central argument that Lovelaces art can best be appreciated through the lenses of bacchanal aesthetics an aesthetics that is rooted in the indigenous traditions of the New World African one which acknowledges the multiplicity of options that defines the essence of Esu-Elegbarathe Yoruba deity of choice and personal will as well as the multicultural imperatives that underpin the evolutions and development of a New World civilization. In theorising African and Caribbean literature and culture Aiyejina has privileged the nexus between ritual and literary tropes. In essays such as Narrating the Narrator An Occasion for Celebration 2008 Novelypso Earl Lovelace and the Bacchanal Tradition 2008 and Unmasking the Chantwell Narrator in Earl Lovelace 2000 Aiyejina explores and analy- ses the various Africa-influenced traditions that underpin and inspire the complexity and multifaceted nature of the works by Lovelace. Aiyejinas recognition of indigenous traditions as the ultimate sources of the inspiration that underscores contem- porary African and African-Caribbean aesthetic culminated in his 2007 Professorial Inaugural Lecture Decolonising Myth From Esu to Bacchanal Aesthetics which has been delivered to enthusiastic audiences in both the Caribbean and Nigeria.In this seminal discourse he challenges the accepted interpreta- tion of the Yoruba deity Esu deconstructs its meaning within the Yoruba and by extension African worldview and recon- structs the Esu principle into an aesthetic and analytical frame- work for the discussion of modern African and Caribbean literature and culture. Over the years Aiyejinas strategic interventions such as his coordinatorship of Campus Literature Week and the estab- lishment of the MFA as well as a his involvement with the Cropper Foundation have positively influenced the develop- ment of creative talents in the Caribbean. He is one of the foundersorganisers of the Bocas Literary Festival which has in less than five years become the pre-eminent literary festival in the English-speaking Caribbean. Aiyejina also serves on the editorial boards of several local and international journals and is an Honorary Fellow of the International Writers Workshop Hong Kong Baptist University Hong Kong. Selected Publications Director Earl Lovelace A writer in His Place A Docu- Commentary 55 minutes 2014. EditorA Place in the World Essays in honour of Earl Lovelace at 70. 2009 Lexicon Trinidad. Editor Self-portraits Interviews with ten West Indian writers and two critics 2003 Kingston Jamaica The University of the West Indies Press