SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The editors set out to challenge and complicate some of the ways in which academics, governments and NGOs think about agency, resistance and co-optation in the context of Africa. In their introduction, they write about the genesis of the project: Ebenezer Obadare’s interest in political jokes in Nigeria led him to reflect on the ways in which ordinary Nigerians “engage, deconstruct and wrestle with” the state. Humour, they write, is “an integral part of an array of stratagems … to recuperate dignity and selfhood amid the humiliations and savageries of everyday postcolonial life” (ixxx). The exciting contribution of this collection lies in the fact that the various authors engage with ways of theorising ordinariness and agency, without always assuming that African individuals are victims.