Obiwu

• The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honor of Michael J. C. Echeruo,[13] Maik Nwosu and Obiwu (eds), 2015, ISBN 9780815633877
• Tigress at Full Moon, 2012, ISBN 9780979085840
• Igbos of Northern Nigeria, 1996, ISBN 9789783256231
• Rituals of the Sun, 1992, ISBN 9789783089532

• "Cultural Icon: Michael J. C. Echeruo and the African Academy".[14] In The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honor of Michael J. C. Echeruo. Maik Nwosu and Obiwu (eds). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. 1–21.
• "Jacques Lacan in Africa: Travel, Moroccan Cemetery, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, and Other Passions of Theory".[15] In The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honor of Michael J. C. Echeruo. Maik Nwosu and Obiwu (eds). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. 75–93.
• "Roy Campell and the Animal Father". Handbook of Social Justice. Augustus Kakanowski and Marijus Narusevich (eds). New York: Nova Science Pub, 2009. 187–201.
• "The Pan-African Brotherhood of Langston Hughes and Nnamdi Azikiwe".[16] Dialectical Anthropology 31.1–3 (November 2007):143–165.
• "Ben Obumselu: The Responsible Critic". The Guardian Literary Series, Lagos (19 June 1993): 19.

In 2012, Obiwu published his second collection of poetry, Tigress at Full Moon. Tigress is compiled from a body of “pieces ranging over a decade and a half of exile, in other words poems solely written in the US”.[17][18] A review by Roger W. Hecht states: "These poems are the embodiment of immortal imagination impregnated with the spirit of creativity…, they chant us to see the vision and imagine ourselves in it." Furthermore, Chielozona Eze points out that he found “the poet [Obiwu] powerful when he engages issues closest to him and his native culture, less so in those instances when a poem becomes a foil for engaging some of those discourses that interest the poet”.[19]

With his PhD dissertation, Obiwu became one of only two Africans to have written “book-length literary interventions" on Lacan, the other being the South African Teresa Dovey.[20] His long-awaited dissertation entitled “In the Name of the Father: Lacanian Reading of Four White South African Writers,” was written under the direction of Silvio A. Torres-Saillant, Michael J. C. Echeruo, Gregg Lambert, and Cecil Abrahams.[21] Obiwu would later write the essay "Jacques Lacan in Africa", to point out the often neglected role that Lacan's trips to Africa had played in shaping his praxis of psychoanalysis.[15]

The international conference on “Olaudah Equiano: Representation and Reality,” which was held on 22 March 2003, at Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, United Kingdom, was an occasion for a widely reported controversy in which Obiwu mounted a challenge to Vincent Carretta's claim that Equiano had misrepresented his birthplace in his famous slave narrative. Writing on the disputation in the Nigeria World, London-based medical doctor and writer Ike Anya reports that "[Obiwu] questioned Carretta’s motives in seeking to demystify Equiano from a very weak evidence base and hinted that race, finance and fame were possible motives ... [He] pointed out the logical flaws in Carretta’s argument and suggested that Carretta visit Africa for further research."[22]

Mark Stein's review of the conference for Early American Literature, notes that "Obiwu Iwuanyanwu (Central State, Wilberforce, Ohio) went as far as accusing those who examine Equiano's African birth of professing 'anti-Equiano scholarship' with the potential to jeopardize the 'enduring human truth' of Equiano's text".[23] Stephen Manning of The Associated Press interviewed Obiwu for his report on the conference: "'[Carretta's] kind of scholarship, which invests excessive energy in pseudo-detective work, devotes too little time to critical analysis, disavows scholarly fellowship and indulges in vast publicity gamesmanship,' Obiwu Iwuanyanwu, who spoke at the conference and teaches at Central State University in Ohio, wrote in an e-mail”.[24][25]

On 17–18 April 2015, 12 years after the Equiano controversy, Obiwu returned to the United Kingdom to present what he termed a preliminary intervention on Igbo sex at "The 4th Annual International Igbo Conference: Igbo Womanhood, Womanbeing and Personhood". The conference was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.[26]

Obiwu described his presentation, entitled "Igbo Sex: The Discovery, Discourse, and Domains of Intimacy among the Igbo", as a cultural history of intimacy among the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria. He opined that "There are two things that make great civilization: It is where the people build their toilets (as the analyst Lacan observes) and how they make love." He went on to say, “Almost every important tradition in the world has a map of the people's sexual history. My Igbo people have no documented archeology of sex beyond the variegated folklores of the diverse communities, regions, and dialects of the land. So, I thought it is about time we started getting the idea a bit clearer.” Obiwu stated that the study stands on the shoulders of such masters of global sexual history as Sigmund Freud, Marie Bonaparte, D. H. Lawrence, Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. The lecture was subsequently published on YouTube.[27]

Following Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's winning the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction with her sophomore novel Half of a Yellow Sun, Obiwu sought to contextualize Adichie's writing both in terms of her historical relations to Chinua Achebe and Olaudah Equiano and in terms of her shared social consciousness with the South African Jewish novelist Nadine Gordimer.[28]

Responding to Obiwu's tribute to Adichie in his Encyclopædia Britannica Blog, J. E. Luebering highlighted the "provocative" nature of inserting Equiano "at the core of Nigerian literature".[29]

Adichie, on the other hand, was more expansive in responding to her comparison with Gordimer in her interview with Renee Shea in the Kenyon Review: “I didn't realize that [Obiwu] had said that. I would say he meant it only half jokingly... I wonder if it's not that classic thing of an African female novelist. I often get Ama Ata Aidoo or Flora Nwapa. I have a deep respect for Gordimer and what she stands for and what she is. Her fiction is, to use that overloaded word, amazing, in many ways”.[30]