Gabriel Bámgbóṣé

Office Hours

Gabriel Bámgbóṣé is a scholar-poet and Assistant Professor of African and Comparative Literature. Before joining UCSD, he taught in the Department of English at Tai Solarin University of Education, the Africana Studies Program at New York University as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (Yorùbá FLTA), and the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Bámgbóṣé’s research and teaching areas include poetry and comparative poetics; Black modernist poetics and philosophy; continental, archipelagic, and diasporic African literatures; African women’s poetry; African folklore and popular culture; Black/African feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial thoughts; translation and critical literacy studies. His current research project focuses on how twentieth-century African women poets and intellectuals reinvent negritude poetics in francophone, lusophone, and anglophone contexts. This research has been supported by the Black Studies Project Faculty Fellowship and Faculty Career Development Award from UCSD, Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and University and Louis Bevier Fellowship from Rutgers University, among others.

Languages: English, Yorùbá, Portuguese, French, Pidgin

Books

• Something Happened After the Rain: Poems (Partridge Africa, 2014).

Articles & Book Chapters

• “A Weapon of Responsibility: The Lyric Cry in Alda Espírito Santo’s and Maria Manuela Margarido’s Negritude Poetics.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 26, no. 3-4: Poetics from the Global South, a special issue edited by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma and Ryan Topper (2024): 467-489.
• “In Conversation: African Women Poets as Translators of the Wor(l)d: Conceição Lima, Tariro Ndoro, and Fatoumata Adelle Barry.” The Translator 29, no. 4: Translation, trouvailles, a special issue edited by Chantal Wright and Kathryn Batchelor (2023): 494-508.
• “Reimagining Transracial Intimacy: The Cartography of Decolonial Love in Leila Aboulela’s ‘Something Old, Something New’ & Tomi Adeaga’s ‘Marriage and Other Impediments.’” African Literature Today 39 (2021): 126-137.
• “Images of Colonialism in the Text of Two African Female Poets.” Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, edited by Kenneth Kalu and Toyin Falola (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 77-99.
• “Beyond Gender Allegory: A Postcolonial Reading of Lola Shoneyin’s Poetry.” Literary and Linguistic Perspectives on Orality, Literacy and Gender Studies: A Festschrift for Oluwatoyin Bimpe Jegede, edited by Ayo Osisanwo et al. (Kraft Books, 2018), 155-169.
• “The Tradition of Black Poetry,” with Kehinde P. Amore. Contemporary Humanities 8 (2015): 1-19.
• “Modern African Verse and the Politics of Authentication.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16, no. 1 (2014): 1-10.
• “The Black Man’s Ordeals: A Postcolonial Reading of Kofi Anyidoho’s AncestralLogic & CaribbeanBlues.” The African Symposium 13, no. 1 (2013): 34-41.
• “Naturalist Aesthetics in John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World.” Humanicus 8 (2013): 1-20.
• “Reading with an Eagle-Eye: The Theory and Practice of African New Criticism.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English 12 (2013): 1-9.
• “Modern African Poetry and the Issues of Gender: The Nigerian Literary Scene.” Research on Humanities and Social Sciences 2, no. 11 (2012): 94-105.
• “Satire in Yoruba Oral Poetic Forms: A Study of ‘Opepere’ Song in Ondo Town.” Journal of Studies in Humanities 3 (2011): 115-131.

Shorter Creative Work

• “Àgbà àti ewì míràn,” Àtẹ́lẹwọ́, October 2020.
• “an other coming” and other poems, Ideas & Futures, September 2020.
• “Àjànàkú já àti ewì míràn,” Àtẹ́lẹwọ́ Pélébé: Àtẹ̀jáde Àkójọpọ̀ ní Èdè Yorùbá, edited by Òrẹ́dọlá Ibrahim and Rasaq Malik, 2018.
• “Fire,” Aké Review, November 2016.
• “The Gaze of Medusa” and other poems, Zokalo Poets, August 2016.
• “so all this time I was sitting on a nail” and “Her Kind,” The Journal of Social and Cultural Analysis, April 2015.
• “A Different Mask” and other poems, Footmarks: Poems on One Hundred Years of Nigeria’s Nationhood, edited by Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo and Naza Amaeze Okoli, 2014.
• “Where Do We Go When We Die,” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, October 2014.
• “April 14” and “Something Happened After the Rain,” Poetry Foundation Ghana, August 2014.
• “Age,” Lantern Magazine, July 2014.
• “Our history” and “Look at these hairs,” Tuck Magazine, July 2014.
• “Signs Taken for Wonders” and “A Tree at the Centre of Flood,” New Asian Writing, June 2014.
• “The Man Eats Our Land,” Poetry Foundation Ghana (longlisted for Ghana Poetry Prize), October 2013.
• “You’d soon be waned” and other poems, The New Black Magazine, December 2013.
• “How can I say this is home” and other poems, Sankofa Magazine, July 2013.
• “The Peace of a Child” and other poems, The Literary Yard, June 2013.
• “She said I walked away,” BareBack Magazine, May 2013.

Book Reviews

• Review of Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, edited by Vanessa K. Valdés. ariel: A Review of International English Literature 53, no. 4 (2022): 177-180.
• Review of Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature, by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma. Journal of the African Literature Association 12, no. 3 (2018): 349–350.

• Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University - New Brunswick, 2022
• M.A. in Literature in English, University of Ibadan, 2014
• B.A. (Ed.) in English, Tai Solarin University of Education, 2010