Black Critics and Kings by Andrew Apter

Skip to product information
1 of 1

Black Critics and Kings by Andrew Apter

Regular price
Checking stock...
Regular price
Checking stock...
Proud to be B-Corp

Our business meets the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. In short, we care about people and the planet.

The feel-good place to buy books
  • Free shipping in the US over $10
  • Supporting authors with AuthorSHARE
  • 100% recyclable packaging
  • Proud to be a B Corp – A Business for good
  • Sell-back with World of Books - Sell your Books

Black Critics and Kings by Andrew Apter

How can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of Black Critics and Kings, which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on "deep" knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time, gender, and sovereignty to promote political—-and even violent—-change. Documenting the development of a Yoruba kingdom from its nineteenth-century genesis to Nigeria's 1983 elections and subsequent military coup, Apter identifies the central role of ritual in reconfiguring power relations both internally and in relation to wider political arenas. What emerges is an ethnography of an interpretive vision that has broadened the horizons of local knowledge to embrace Christianity, colonialism, class formation, and the contemporary Nigerian state. In this capacity, Yoruba òrìsà worship remains a critical site of response to hegemonic interventions. With sustained theoretical argument and empirical rigor, Apter answers critical anthropologists who interrogate the possibility of ethnography. He reveals how an indigenous hermeneutics of power is put into ritual practice—-with multiple voices, self-reflexive awareness, and concrete political results. Black Critics and Kings eloquently illustrates the ethnographic value of listening to the voice of the other, with implications extending beyond anthropology to engage leading debates in black critical theory.
Andrew Apter is Professor of History and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he directs the James S. Coleman African Studies Center. His books include Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (1992), The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (2005), and Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa (2007), all with the University of Chicago Press. Lauren Derby is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her publications include The Dictator's Seduction: Politics and the Popular Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (2009), and articles on rumor and politics in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Puerto Rico.
SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780226023434
ISBN 10 0226023435
Title Black Critics and Kings
Author Andrew Apter
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Year published 1992-04-15
Number of pages 298
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note Unavailable