Transcripts of the Sacred in Nigeria

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.

"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 of Emirs in London: Subaltern Travel and Nigeria's Modernity

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Ambiguity of the SacredInterlude: Methodological Matters and a Theory of African Postcolony1. The Sacred as Im/possibility2. Demons as Guests: Pentecostal Aesthetics of Prayers3. The Pentecostal Incredible4. Production of Violence in the Postcolony5. Chosenness, Spirituality, and the Weight of Blackness6. Disruption and Promise: The Religious Powers of DevelopmentConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex