The Postcolonial African State in Transition

Amy Niang

doi:10.5771/9781786606549

Summary

The Postcolonial African State in Transition offers a new perspective on a set of fundamental, albeit old questions with salient contemporary resonance: what is the nature of the postcolonial state? How did it come about? And more crucially, the book poses an often neglected question: what was the postcolonial African state internally built against? Through a detailed historical investigation of the Voltaic region, the book theorizes the state in transition as the constitutive condition of the African state, rendering centralization processes as always transient, uncertain, even dangerous endeavours. In Africa and elsewhere in the colonial and postcolonial world, the centralized sovereign state has become something of a meta-model that bears the imprint of necessity and determinism.

This book argues that there is nothing natural, linear, conventional or intrinsically consensual about the centralized state form. In fact, the African state emerged, and was erected against, and at the expense of a variety of authority structures and forms of self-governance. The state has sustained itself through destructive practices, internal colonization, and in fact the production and alienation of a range of internal others.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2018
ISBN-Print: 978-1-78660-652-5
ISBN-Online: 978-1-78660-654-9
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 232
Product type: Book Titles

1. Contents No access
2. Acknowledgements No access
1. Introduction No access
2. State(ness) as Historicity: A Misreading No access
3. 1. Failed-State Literature No access
  2. (Neo)patrimonialist Literature No access
  3. Interventionist Literature No access
4. Un-understanding the State No access
5. The State in Transition: A Proposal No access
6. The Naam and Tenga: A Normative Order and Its Legitimation No access
1. Introduction No access
2. The Ecology of Social Organization No access
3. Social Formation at the Intersection of Mobility and Encounter No access
4. The Voltaic Region: A Common Culture-Area No access
5. Generic Construct: Of Stranger-Kings and Accomodating Natives No access
6. The Political Economy of a State Formation No access
7. Gradations of Stateness No access
8. Mamprugu: The Core State No access
9. The Mossi States of Ouagadougou/Yatenga: Steady Statization No access
10. Dagbon: A Mobile kingdom No access
11. Dagara/Dagaaba/Dagao: Uneven Statelessness No access
12. What to Make of All This? No access
13. Conclusion No access
1. Introduction No access
2. Spatial Occupation and/as the Ethics of Being/Relating No access
3. Land Gods and Territorial Occupation: Mediating Social Phenomena No access
4. Ritual Locales and Sovereignty No access
5. Subjectivities of Intersection No access
6. Constitutional Practice and Authority in a Decentralized Society No access
7. Of Politics and the Political No access
8. Schmitt and the Theological State No access
9. Conclusion No access
1. Introduction No access
2. 1. Myths of Origin in Moogo No access
  2. The Ends of Power No access
3. 1. The Naam, Jural Corporateness and Rog-n-miki No access
  2. Frames of Interdependence No access
  3. Earthpriests No access
  4. Blacksmiths No access
4. Of Codes of Hospitality and Social Integration No access
5. 1. 1. The Ethics of Othering: Identity and Centralization No access
6. 1. Pogsiure, or Deferred Exchange in Women No access
7. Of Slaves, Captives and Systems of Servitude No access
8. Conclusion No access
1. Introduction No access
2. Withdrawal of the High God as a Process of Socialization of Belief No access
3. Proposition of Power and Principles No access
4. The Dual Principle as Model: Ringu, or History Transacted No access
5. 1. 1. Belief and Historical Experience: The State as Hermeneus No access
6. Conclusion No access
1. Of Sovereignty and Stateness No access
2. Centralization and Consolidation: The Colonial Encounter No access
3. The Post-independence State: Governance and Cultural Bricolage No access
4. Thomas Sankara and the Conceptualization of African Revolutionary Modernity No access
5. Problematized Statehood: Divergences and Dislocations No access
6. Recentring the Debate: Three Propositions No access
7. Conclusion No access
Appendix: Glossary of Mooré Terms No access Pages 205 - 212
Bibliography No access Pages 213 - 226
Index No access Pages 227 - 232