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ISBN: PB: 9780226669656

ISBN: HB: 9780226669649

University of Chicago Press

July 2010

216 pp.

23x15 cm

16 halftones

PB:
£21,00
QTY:
HB:
£60,00
QTY:

Categories:

Nostalgia for the Future

West Africa after the Cold War

Since the end of the cold war, Africa has seen a dramatic rise in new political and religious phenomena, including an eviscerated privatized state, neoliberal NGOs, Pentecostalism, a resurgence in accusations of witchcraft, a culture of scamming and fraud, and, in some countries, a nearly universal wish to emigrate. Drawing on fieldwork in Togo, Charles Piot suggests that a new biopolitics after state sovereignty is remaking the face of one of the world's poorest regions.

In a country where playing the U. S. Department of State's green card lottery is a national pastime and the preponderance of cybercafes and Western Union branches signals a widespread desire to connect to the rest of the world, "Nostalgia for the Future" makes clear that the cultural and political terrain that underlies postcolonial theory has shifted. In order to map out this new terrain, Piot enters into critical dialogue with a host of important theorists, including Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Deleuze, and Mbembe. The result is a deft interweaving of rich observations of Togolese life with profound insights into the new, globalized world in which that life takes place.

About the Author

Charles Piot is professor in the departments of cultural anthropology and African and African American studies at Duke University. He is the author of "Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa", also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"This book is not merely bold and timely; it brims with imagination and insight. Charles Piot makes the vibrant cultural politics of contemporary West Africa speak directly to key questions of our late modern world. In his hands, tireless Togolese efforts to escape an inauspicious past yield new theoretical possibilities for a generation of social scientists, themselves nostalgic for an era of more confident understanding" – Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago

"In this vivid book, Charles Piot juxtaposes novel and unexpected trends that emerged in Togo – and elsewhere in West Africa – in the 1990s to convincingly argue that, in many respects, the post-cold war moment marks a dramatic break from the preceding decades and their postcolonial framework. The book shows with some urgency that this incisive rupture requires new theoretical points of departure, and thus will have a major, innovative impact in African studies and anthropology in general" – Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam

"The book impresses with its well-researched theoretical framework, its strong anthropological base, its ethnography and documentation of the activities and politics of the charismatic churches, the crisis of subsistence and the impact of NGOs, and the most appealing of all the survival strategies: the lotto visa. This well-written book contains good illustrations that help readers contextualize the stories" – Choice