Meet Assistant Professor Tosin Gbogi

With two older brothers heavily invested in hip-hop, Assistant Professor Tosin Gbogi grew up in Nigeria immersed in the music, fashion, and visuals. His brother Ambrose (MC “Amby”) even formed a rap group with a friend (“K-Pac”), together writing reams of rhymes. “I was with them on most days they worked together and served as their ‘acolyte,’” recalls Gbogi, who joined the English faculty this fall. “I think what really intrigued me, looking back at things now, was the seriousness with which the duo approached their craft and verbal art. They introduced me to poetry in its varied forms—spoken, chanted, recorded, and written.”

Years later, Gbogi became a scholar of poetry and poetics, African and African diaspora literatures, and postcolonial and decolonial theories. He has also published two poetry collections, the tongues of a shattered s-k-y (2012) and locomotifs and other songs (2018). But his latest book looks back past that work to its original inspiration. Nigerian Hip-Hop: Race, Knowledge, and the Poetics of Resistance (Oxford, out December 2025) is the first comprehensive study of Nigerian hip-hop, drawing on a varied range of sources, from lyrics to videos, visual art to interviews. 

Beyond your personal interest in hip-hop culture, what led you to write this book?

The book developed as an attempt to think seriously with and about hip-hop in Africa. There were two interrelated interests that I had when I set out: (1) to map the literary and poetic contours of Nigerian hip-hop and with this reopen conversations about contemporary oral poetic forms that have been overshadowed by the overemphasis on print and writing in African literary studies; and (2) to theorize hip-hop and popular culture as crucial sites of decolonial thinking and social change in Africa. Of course, things changed, narrowed, and expanded as I began to write, but the whole point at the end was to think of “the literary” beyond writing and the page, and intense epistemic contemplations beyond the frame of the so-called high art.

What's the next project?

I am now at work on a project on migration and African literature. There were many things that led me to the project: the global Black orientation of my new monograph, which brings Nigeria, Africa, and the African diaspora into a focused conversation; my own identity as an immigrant; and the point that some of the most experimental and formally ambitious works I have read in African literature in the last 15 years have revolved around migration. Like anything I write—poetry, articles, or books—I normally like to follow ideas, texts, or archives for a substantial length of time before getting to work. This is a project that has been on my mind for a while. I am deeply interested in questions around migration, memorials, diaspora, and dirge.

What is your favorite work to teach?

I have enjoyed teaching a wide range of texts straddling different cultural contexts, periods, and genres, including Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter, Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, and hip-hop. But if there is a text that I have really enjoyed returning to, it would be Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I am enchanted by how the work pushes the generic boundaries of the novel through its layered appeal to the ethnographic and the historical, and how it complicates our understanding of “writing” through its intermodal immersion in Black oral traditions. In my classes, I often like students to think with texts that refuse to obey preconceived criteria for judging literary works, for sorting them into “neat” categories, and for deciding what counts or doesn’t count as literary. Their Eyes Were Watching God, much like Hurston’s other works (such as the long-unpublished Barracoon), allows me to foster this conversation in the classroom.

What was the most intriguing book you've read this year? 

Susanna Sacks’ Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Southern African Poetry. There is a certain critical and theoretical complexity that is at work in this book, which challenges us to pay attention to how the aesthetics of African verbal art haunt and shape the emergence, forms, and circulation of African poetry online, how the formal features of online poetry structure offline poetry performances, and how the algorithms of social media platforms impact and modulate literary style. There is, of course, also the methodology, which clearly accepts close reading but rejects the tendency to dismiss the ethnographic/netnographic as an invalid method for literary inquiries. 

You grew up in Nigeria. What do you miss?

I grew up in the southwestern part of the country. I moved around a lot and lived in many places before leaving the country many years ago. I think what I miss most about Nigeria is the spontaneity and improvisational nature of life—the sense that everything isn’t always planned ahead, that time is open and is always bending to accommodate a multitude of interests, and that someone is always passing by and spontaneously stopping at your door. That radical openness to surprise, and the perpetual motion and sense of community that drive it, are the things I terribly miss when I am not in Nigeria.

What are you most excited about in joining the English faculty at the University of Minnesota?

Communities and interlocutors are integral to the life of the mind. In coming to Minnesota, I am most excited about the opportunity to be in conversation with both creative writers and literary scholars. For me, the boundaries between writing and performance and scholarly and theoretical engagements with these artistic practices are not exactly always clearcut. I very much like that our department does both with equal attention and eloquence. Beyond our department, I am also excited about the opportunity to be in conversation with scholars of African and postcolonial literatures and cultures. Many of them are spread across other departments, including African American & African Studies, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, Music, and French & Italian. It matters to be able to exchange ideas with these colleagues.