Tejumola Olaniyan, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presents the lecture On Bigness: Wealth, Power and Body Size in African Political Cartoons at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday, May 4, in Bates College’s Keck Classroom, Pettengill Hall (G52).

Presented in conjunction with the “Considering Africa” general education concentration at Bates and with the participation of the Africana Club, the event is sponsored by the anthropology department. For more information, please contact 207-786-6933.

Olaniyan, the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English at Wisconsin, is working on a book about political cartoonists in English-speaking African countries such as Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

In a 2005 University of Wisconsin-Madison news article by Barbara Wolff, Olaniyan said that his subject is universally relevant. “My current work pays homage to the heroic people who put their visionary ideas that our society could be better than it is into committed practice, often at a great personal cost,” he said.

Olaniyan’s research centers around the African diaspora, postcolonial literary and cultural studies, and popular culture studies. His publications include the books Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (Indiana University Press, 2004) and Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African American and Caribbean Drama (Oxford University Press, 1995).

Olaniyan maintains the website Political Cartoonists and Cartooning in Africa.

The collection of Oliphant’s work includes 15 cartoons drawn between 1969 and 1996. Most offer commentary on Muskie’s activities from 1969 to 1972, when he was a frontrunner for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. One large caricature of Muskie on display was unveiled at his 80th birthday celebration in 1994.

“While some of the cartoons seem to poke fun at Muskie, as Oliphant did with all political figures, Muskie generally took the attention in good humor,” said Christopher Beam, director of the Muskie Archives and lecturer in history at Bates. “Muskie enjoyed political cartoons, and appreciated the cartoonist’s craft and the difficulties of condensing sometimes complex commentary into a single rendering.”

The prints originally were published in a number of national newspapers and were later acquired by the Muskie Foundation in Washington, D.C., which has exhibited them at the Maine State House and has loaned them indefinitely to Bates College. The foundation was established in 1997 to promote the legacy of one of Maine’s leading citizens and to support the activities of both the Muskie Archives at Bates and the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine.

Dedicated in 1985, the Edmund S. Muskie Archives documents the Bates alumnus’ career in public service from his first election to the Maine House of Representatives in 1946 to his appointment as U.S. Secretary of State in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter, and his activities after leaving public office. It holds a permanent collection of memorabilia from Muskie’s personal and public life and represents the first such facility in Maine to be established as a separate repository at an institution of higher education. Each year the Muskie Archives sponsors lectures, symposia and conferences on national and state politics, foreign policy and environmental issues.