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| Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century
ISBN: 9781782042334
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Boydell & Brewer
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: History ; Political Science ; Anthropology;
Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed.
The recent eruption of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle East has reopened academic debate on the meaning and strategies of resistance in the 21st century. This book argues that Western notions of state and civilsociety provide only a limited understanding of how power and resistance operate in the African context, where informality is central to the way both state officials and citizens exercise agency.
With the principle of informality as a template, the chapters in this volume collectively examine the various modes - organised and unorganised, formal and informal, urban and rural, embodied and discursive, serious and ludic, online and offline, successful and failing - through which Africans contend with power. Resistance takes place against the backdrop of deep fractures in state sovereignty, the remnants of colonial rule and the constraints of a global, neoliberal economic system.
Ebenezer Obadare is Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas; Wendy Willems is Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Obadare Ebenezer :
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also a senior fellow at the New York University School of Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs, as well as a fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute of Theology. His books include Humor , Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria (2016), Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century (2014) . Schulz Dorothea E. :
DOROTHEA E. SCHULZ is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Münster; she previously taught at Indiana University and the University of Cologne. Her books include Muslims and New Media in West Africa: Pathways to God (2012) and, co-edited with Patrick A. Desplat, Prayer in the City: The Making of Muslim Sacred Places and Urban Life (2012).Obadare Ebenezer :
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also a senior fellow at the New York University School of Professional Studies Center for Global Affairs, as well as a fellow at the University of South Africa's Institute of Theology. His books include Humor , Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria (2016), Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century (2014) . Thomson Susan :
SUSAN THOMSON is Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. |
