This landmark volume compiled by Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland O. Abiodun brings readers into the diverse world of Ifa-its discourse, ways of thinking, and artistic expression as manifested throughout the Afro-Atlantic. Firmly rooting Ifa within African religious traditions, the essays consider Ifa and Ifa divination from the perspectives of philosophy, performance studies, and cultural studies. They also examine the sacred context, verbal art, and the interpretation of Ifa texts and philosophy. With essays from the most respected scholars in the field, the book makes a substantial contribution toward understanding Ifa and its role in contemporary Yoruba and diaspora cultures.

For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa."

For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization's deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa."

Yoruba culture has been a part of the Americas for centuries, brought over by the first slaves and maintained in various forms ever since. In Oduduwa's Chain, Andrew Apter locates that culture, both spatially and analytically, and offers a Yoruba-focused perspective on rethinking African heritage in Black Atlantic Studies. Focusing on Yoruba history and culture in Nigeria, Apter applies a generative model of cultural revision that allows him to identify formative Yoruba influences without resorting to the idea that culture and tradition are fixed. Apter shows how the association of African gods with Catholic saints can be seen as strategy of empowerment, explores historical locations of Yoruba gender ideologies and their manifestation and change in the Atlantic world, and more. He concludes with a rousing call for a return to Africa in studies of the Black Atlantic, resurrecting a critical notion of culture that allows us to go beyond the mirror of Africa that the West invented.

How can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of "Black Critics and Kings," which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on "deep" knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time, gender, and sovereignty to promote political---and even violent---change.
Documenting the development of a Yoruba kingdom from its nineteenth-century genesis to Nigeria's 1983 elections and subsequent military coup, Apter identifies the central role of ritual in reconfiguring power relations both internally and in relation to wider political arenas. What emerges is an ethnography of an interpretive vision that has broadened the horizons of local knowledge to embrace Christianity, colonialism, class formation, and the contemporary Nigerian state. In this capacity, Yoruba "orisa" worship remains a critical site of response to hegemonic interventions.
With sustained theoretical argument and empirical rigor, Apter answers critical anthropologists who interrogate the possibility of ethnography. He reveals how an indigenous hermeneutics of power is put into ritual practice---with multiple voices, self-reflexive awareness, and concrete political results. "Black Critics and Kings" eloquently illustrates the ethnographic value of listening to the voice of the other, with implications extending beyond anthropology to engage leading debates in black critical theory.

This landmark volume compiled by Jacob K. Olupona and Rowland O. Abiodun brings readers into the diverse world of Ifa-its discourse, ways of thinking, and artistic expression as manifested throughout the Afro-Atlantic. Firmly rooting Ifa within African religious traditions, the essays consider Ifa and Ifa divination from the perspectives of philosophy, performance studies, and cultural studies. They also examine the sacred context, verbal art, and the interpretation of Ifa texts and philosophy. With essays from the most respected scholars in the field, the book makes a substantial contribution toward understanding Ifa and its role in contemporary Yoruba and diaspora cultures.

Yoruba culture has been a part of the Americas for centuries, brought over by the first slaves and maintained in various forms ever since. In Oduduwa's Chain, Andrew Apter locates that culture, both spatially and analytically, and offers a Yoruba-focused perspective on rethinking African heritage in Black Atlantic Studies. Focusing on Yoruba history and culture in Nigeria, Apter applies a generative model of cultural revision that allows him to identify formative Yoruba influences without resorting to the idea that culture and tradition are fixed. Apter shows how the association of African gods with Catholic saints can be seen as strategy of empowerment, explores historical locations of Yoruba gender ideologies and their manifestation and change in the Atlantic world, and more. He concludes with a rousing call for a return to Africa in studies of the Black Atlantic, resurrecting a critical notion of culture that allows us to go beyond the mirror of Africa that the West invented.

When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's "The Pan-African Nation" tells the fascinating story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust.
According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from many of its diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs, and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation.
"The Pan-African Nation "unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points toward a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.

Even within anthropology, a discipline that strives to overcome misrepresentations of peoples and cultures, colonialist depictions of the so-called Dark Continent run deep. The grand narratives, tribal tropes, distorted images, and "natural" histories that forged the foundations of discourse about Africa remain firmly entrenched. In "Beyond Words," Andrew Apter explores how anthropology can come to terms with the "colonial library" and begin to develop an ethnographic practice that transcends the politics of Africa's imperial past.
The way out of the colonial library, Apter argues, is by listening to critical discourses in Africa that reframe the social and political contexts in which they are embedded. Apter develops a model of critical agency, focusing on a variety of language genres in Africa situated in rituals that transform sociopolitical relations by self-consciously deploying the power of language itself. To break the cycle of Western illusions in discursive constructions of Africa, he shows, we must listen to African voices in ways that are culturally and locally informed. In doing so, Apter brings forth what promises to be a powerful and influential theory in contemporary anthropology.