Collector, Curator, Creator: Nigerian folktales and their colonial appropriation, feminist intervention, and contemporary re-appropriation.

This thesis will analyse the collection and dissemination of Nigerian folktales from a postcolonial feminist perspective, and explore how the folktale form has been reappropriated in contemporary Anglophone African fiction. I plan to investigate the colonial-era appropriation of Nigerian folktales as told by women - and about women - from the archives of Elphinstone Dayrell, former district commissioner of Nigeria, and Angela Carter, who published a selection of Dayrell's collected narratives as part of her feminist intervention in fairy tales and folktales. Importantly, my project will also demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the Nigerian folktale by exploring the ways in which Nnedi Okorafor, Irenosen Okojie, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Akwaeke Emezi incorporate and creatively adapt folktale forms and tropes in their fiction.
In the early 1900s, Dayrell collected and translated Nigerian folktales; subsequently, folktales from Dayrell's collections were included in Carter's two Virago Book[s] of Fairy Tales (1990, 1993). Whilst Carter's work has been extensively researched, her folktale selection methods have been overlooked. I will investigate the contextual significance of Carter's anthologies and assess their intersectional limitations. I will then explore how the folktale form is being reappropriated by contemporary Nigerian women writers who creatively include folkloric forms and themes in their fiction. For this, I will examine Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death (2010), Akata Witch (2011) and the Binti trilogy (2019), short stories from Irenosen Okojie's Speak Gigantular (2016) and Lesley Nneka Arimah's What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (2017), and Akwaeke Emezi's novella, Freshwater (2018). By emphasising the ways in which archival material can deepen our understanding of contemporary literature, this project will offer an innovative critical methodology for African literary history. My proposed thesis builds on my project for the final-year Postcolonial Texts module (graded as First Class and for which I received the HopeRoad Prize) and on my MRes dissertation (for which I am predicted a Distinction grade). On the basis of my academic undergraduate record, I won a highly competitive NTU Research Pathway Scholarship; this bursary supports postgraduates who show exceptional promise as future researchers. At NTU's 2018 English Research Fair, I was the first student to present on a Postcolonial Texts project; this experience added to my determination to pursue postgraduate research. I am currently part of a group-placement at Nottingham Contemporary, using my knowledge of postcolonial and gender theories to inform a series of public-facing events.
Scholarly folktale research focuses on European varieties, largely approaching such narratives as 'ahistorical' and 'universal' (Haase 2010). Yet the collection and translation processes of folktales from outside of Europe is inextricable from colonial cultural appropriation. From a South Asian perspective, Naithani (1997; 2006; 2010) investigates how British 'colonizer-folklorists' exploited uncredited, native assistants who completed most of the collection and translation work. However, research specifically concerning Nigerian folktales is scarce. This lack of scholarly intervention will be addressed through examining Dayrell's work as a 'colonizer-folklorist' (Naithani 1997), involving consulting his published folktale volumes (1910, 1913) and notebook manuscripts, held at the Royal Anthropological Institute.