Biodun “BJ” Jeyifo, a leading literary critic and cultural theorist known for his analysis of modernity and its attendant social and cultural crises, died Feb. 11 in Lagos, Nigeria. He was 80.

Jeyifo, professor emeritus of literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), taught at Cornell from 1989 to 2006. He specialized in world Anglophone literature and culture and was editor of the anthology “Modern African Drama.”

Carole Boyce-Davies, the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emerita and emerita professor of Africana studies and literatures in English (A&S), met Jeyifo at the University of Ìbàdàn in Nigeria as a doctoral student studying African literature.

“His was an example of fearless criticism called the ‘bolekaja’ school of criticism, meaning ‘come down and fight,’ intended to contest older lingering colonialist approaches,“ Boyce-Davies said. “He was an example for graduate students like me of being a courageous scholar unafraid to challenge institutional scholarly paradigms, which maintained exclusions of more progressive analytical approaches. Beginning a career as a scholar with such an example has marked my continued approach to teaching and scholarship.”

Jeyifo was an authority on the works and career of the Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka. Jeyifo’s award-winning book “Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism,” is regarded as the most comprehensive study of the author’s work.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, professor at the Africana Studies and Research Center, met Jeyifo also as a student at the University of Ìbàdàn, “but my relationship with BJ was not structured by the usual teacher-student model,” Táíwò said. “It was principally in the realm of social, labor and political movements that BJ became my teacher, a comrade, a family friend and a lifelong interlocutor.”

Jeyifo was a leader in the movement to rename the University of Ìbàdàn’s Department of English to the Department of Literature in English, Táíwò said, and one of the founders of the Radical Perspectives in Literature Conference, which changed the practice of literary criticism in Nigerian academia.

“BJ was a brilliant scholar and a generous colleague who, more than any other figure in the history of the department, showed what it would mean to take seriously ‘the task of decolonialization,’” said Paul Sawyer, professor emeritus and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow in the Department of Literatures in English. “He was a fierce critic of British imperialism who grew up loving English literature; he believed that human progress came about only by embracing complexity and difference.”

In later research, Jeyifo also turned his attention to Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and wrote a series of essays in the early 1990s that placed Achebe’s work, including the 1958 novel, “Things Fall Apart,” in an ideological and theoretical perspective not previously considered by other critics.

“As much as BJ was attached to elite institutions in the U.S., he seemed always a man firmly rooted in his native Nigeria,” said Grant Farred, professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center and a professor of literatures in English. “As if his thinking always began there, as if his mind was always attuned to what it is that the African continent might have to say. But for all that, no one doubts that he was a resolutely transatlantic thinker.”

Jeyifo earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Ìbàdàn, and his master’s and doctoral degrees from New York University. He taught at the University of Ìbàdàn from 1975-77, the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) from 1977-87 and Oberlin College from 1987-88 before joining the Cornell faculty in 1989. In 2006 he moved on to Harvard University, where he taught until retiring in 2019.

Satya P. Mohanty, professor emeritus of literatures in English, said he considered Jeyifo part of his extended family.

“To me, BJ was a rare friend who embodied some of the best old-world values, namely courage, integrity and a fierce commitment to social justice,” Mohanty said. “In these times when ethno-nationalisms of all kinds are becoming the norm, he was a genuine internationalist.”

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.