Overview

Transcripts of the Sacred in Nigeria explores how the sacred plays itself out in contemporary Africa. It offers a creative analysis of the logics and dynamics of the sacred (understood as the constellation of im/possibility available to a given community) in religion, politics, epistemology, economic development, and reactionary violence. Using the tools of philosophy, postcolonial criticism, political theory, African studies, religious studies, and cultural studies, Wariboko reveals the intricate connections between the sacred and the existential conditions that characterize disorder, terror, trauma, despair, and hope in the postcolonial Africa. The sacred, Wariboko argues, is not about religion or divinity but the set of possibilities opened to a people or denied them, the sum total of possibilities conceivable given their level of social, technological, and economic development. These possibilities profoundly speak to the present political moment in sub-Saharan Africa.

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9780253066435

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Reviews

With Transcripts of the Sacred in Nigeria, Wariboko has given African Studies a real gem. This is a book of great intellectual capacity, creative imagination, and amazing human agency. --Olufemi Vaughan, Alfred Sargent Lee '41 & Mary Ames Lee Professor and Chair of Black Studies, Amherst College, and Author of Religion and the Making of Nigeria

"""With Transcripts of the Sacred in Nigeria, Wariboko has given African Studies a real gem. This is a book of great intellectual capacity, creative imagination, and amazing human agency.""--Olufemi Vaughan, Alfred Sargent Lee '41 & Mary Ames Lee Professor and Chair of Black Studies, Amherst College, and Author of Religion and the Making of Nigeria ""How can we account for the contradictory co-existence of Africa's postcolonial socioeconomic predicament and the seemingly irrational hopes of its people in the possibilities of redemption? Nimi Wariboko brilliantly transcends the familiar answer of a postcolonial religious sublime to propose a radically novel framework of the ""transcripts of the sacred"" in postcolonial Nigeria -- an assemblage of intersecting secular and quasi-religious signs, discourses, and quotidian practices that embed possibility in impossibility, simultaneously constraining and catalyzing human flourishing. Wariboko's theory of the sacred offers a rich, capacious site for understanding and critiquing everyday manifestations of the beautiful, the monstrous, and the ridiculous. This highly original book compellingly argues that, when understood together rather than separately, the signs and categories of the sacred can illuminate Nigeria's conjoined postcolonial dystopias and utopias.""--Moses Ochonu, author ofEmirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria's Modernity"

Author Information

Nimi Wariboko is Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics at Boston University. His books include Social Ethics and Governance in Contemporary African Writing and The Split Time: Economic Philosophy for Human Flourishing in African Perspective.

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