Folkloric Metamodernism Orality Textuali

The contemporary moment of African literature is marked by a decolonial resurgence that seeks to transcribe the living breath of oral traditions into textual form without ossifying their vitality. This paper examines how Ini Ubong Ite's Ekọñ Ñke: Our Stories meets this challenge by advancing a distinct literary mode termed folkloric metamodernism. Moving beyond the critical impasse between nostalgic nativism and postmodern pastiche that often characterizes studies of African orality, Ubong Ite's curation of Ibibio tales employs a dynamic oscillation between sincerity and irony, the communal and the individual, the ancestral and the contemporary, to reactivate folklore for twenty-first-century critique. Through close readings of four stories, this analysis delineates three core strategies of this mode: formal oscillation in linguistic code-switching, affective hybridity in narrative voice, and temporal collapse in plot structure. The paper traces a progressive arc in Ubong Ite's project, demonstrating how folkloric metamodernism evolves from a tool for negotiating ethical dilemmas to a framework for epistemological inquiry, ontological reimagining, and ultimately, radical political allegory. Ultimately, this study contends that Ubong Ite's work constitutes a significant decolonial aesthetic.