From 13 to 22 October 2021, the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship hosted a ten-day Summer Institute as part of the Mellon Foundation funded project "Entanglement, Mobility, and Improvisation: Culture and Arts in Contemporary African Urbanism and its Hinterlands". 

Prof Akin Adesokan of Indiana University, Bloomington delivered the keynote address on the second day of the programme, presenting a paper on "The City That Never Stays Quiet or Still: On "Vernacular Architectures" and the Democratic Sublime in Lagos". 

It is anticipated that some of this event’s papers will be developed and published in a special journal edition.

On 20 and 21 October, the project hosted a production of the play “Bloke and His American Bantu”. This play was written by project and Centre associate Dr Siphiwo Mahala and is a revival of the story of two artistic friends, Bloke Modisane and Langston Hughes, writers, and activists from Sophiatown, South Africa and Harlem, USA respectively. The dramatic piece is about the trafficking of ideas between the North and the South in the making of African urbanities, and a rendering of a nascent emergence of cosmopolitan culture in Johannesburg.