ABSTRACT
My fi rst attempt to present È làlò rò to an international audience was at the fi rst ever International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) congress to be held in Africa,1 at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. My paper was titled, “È làlò rò : A (Pan-) African Theory for Critical Discourse.” I revisitd the issue of racial biases in critical process and African writers during and immediately after colonization and Black American writers, especially before Harlem Rennanssance had fi rsthand experience of what I call racist criticism. But what might his be? Chinua Achebe (1989) simply calls it colonialist criticism (79-90). It is the kind of criticsm where White critics reject literary projects for simple reason that it did not look like European form, or where Anglo-American critics side with a White author when he or she demonstrated racist tendency by portraying non-White people as lesser than White. In my paper, Niyi Osundare and Chniua Achebe feature prominently because of their vocal voices against racist criticism. I submitted È làlò rò as a discourse paradigm, and, although it embraces cultural originality, it is antithetic to racist and myopic tendencies.
