Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: State and culture in Africa: the possibilities of strangeness / Tejumola Olaniyan -- Culture and the study of politics in postcolonial Africa / Patrick Chabal -- Joined at the hip: African literature and Africa's body politic / Niyi Osundare -- Philosophy and the state in postcolonial Africa / Olufémi Taiwo -- Soccer and the state: the politics and morality of daily life / Michael G. Schatzberg -- The enchanted history of Nigerian state television / Matthew H. Brown -- "Performing like there's no tomorrow": theater, war, and social vulnerability in Mozambique / Luis Madureira -- Fissures of trespass: women as agents of transgression amid national disenchantment / Nevine El Nossery -- The Sudanese nation and its fragments: Tayeb Salih's literary archaeology / Sofia Samatar -- The African postcolonial predicament: a logic of revenge, prison poetry, and becoming human / Ken Walibora Waliaula -- "Jesus Christ, executive producer": Pentecostal parapolitics in Nollywood films / Akin Adesokan -- Hi-fi sociality, lo-fi sound: affect and precarity in an independent South African recording studio / Louise Meintjes -- Talibe trafficking: the transformation of Koranic teaching in Senegal / Lark Porter -- Tradition of resistance in Nigeria's print media: an example from theNEWS / Kunle Ajibade -- Improvisational characteristics of an urban fragment: Oxford Street, Accra / Ato Quayson -- Gaining ground: squatters and the right to the city / Anne-Maria Makhulu -- African urban garrison architecture: property, armed robbery, para-capitalism / Tejumola Olaniyan.