[ecrea] new book: Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century

Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century



Edited by Ebenezer Obadare and Wendy Willems



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 civil society 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



Published by James Currey, Oxford

http://www.jamescurrey.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=14424



Book launch at the London School of Economics and Political Science, 12 
March 2014, 6.30-8pm:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2014/03/20140312t1830vCLM5.02.aspx



Contents



1  Foreword by Patrick Chabal



2  INTRODUCTION - African resistance in an age of fractured sovereignty 
by Wendy Willems and Ebenezer Obadare



PART ONE: POST-COLONIAL STATE FORMATION AND PARALLEL INFRASTRUCTURES



3  Global technologies of domination and arts of resistance in Africa: 
from colonial encounters to the Arab Spring by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni



4  Citizenship from below: the politics of citizen action and resistance 
in South Africa and Angola by Bettina von Lieres



PART TWO: EMBODIED MODES OF RESISTANCE AND THE POST-COLONIAL STATE



5  The politics of confinement and mobility: informality, relocations 
and urban re-making from below by Ilda Lindell and Markus Ihalainen



6  Overcoming socio-economic marginalisation: Young West African 
hustlers and the reinvention of global capitalism by Basile Ndjio



7  Accepting authoritarianism? Everyday resistance as political 
consciousness in post-genocide Rwanda by Susan Thomson



PART THREE: POPULAR CULTURE AS DISCURSIVE FORMS OF RESISTANCE



8  Participatory politics in South Africa: social commentary from above 
and resistance from below by Innocentia J. Mhlambi



9  Laughing at the rainbow's cracks? Blackness, whiteness and the 
ambivalences of South African stand-up comedy by Grace A. Musila



10  'Beasts of no nation': Resistance and civic activism in Fela 
Anikulapo-Kuti's music by Jendele Hungbo



PART FOUR: PUBLICS AS EVERYDAY SITES OF RESISTANCE



11  The power of resonance: Music, local radio stations, and the sounds 
of cultural belonging in Mali by Dorothea E. Schulz



12  Narrating the contested public sphere: Zapiro, Zuma and freedom of 
expression in South Africa by Daniel Hammett






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