African Futures

The book present book consists of previously unpublished essays by some of the most prominent people in contemporary Africanist anthropology. Collectively, they confront an intellectual landscape of opposed perspectives, attempting not so much to move beyond as to think within the contradictions and perplexities that characterize the current moment. In the aftermath of the demise of the master tropes and grand narratives, both tragic and romantic, African Futures addresses the question of futurity embedded within various social processes and cultural forms emerging in Africa today. The essays explore contemporary formations through which the contours of the future are being imagined: the refiguring of the city through the informal and the informational; the efflorescence of signs and wonders and so many prosperity gospels; the production and collapse of assorted techniques of juridification and illegality; regimes of invisibility that seduce and subvert everyday linearity; lotteries and Ponzi schemes that hedge the present against tomorrow; apocalyptic revelations of the end of time; visions of impending and unknown worlds; a pervasive yearning for exile. What unites these investigations is their shared (though not necessarily uniform) analysis of a continent irreducible to its alleged critical condition, as well as their overriding commitment to the plural and open-ended over the monolithic and predetermined. Thus alert to the profound, often vexing intricacies and incongruities of contemporary social, political, religious, and economic formations, these essays investigate the emergent trends, practices, aesthetics, and subjectivities that reveal the many prospects for the future of Africa.