Hard Work, Hard Times

“Social science has given us powerful and compelling studies of postcolonial failure, but it has not adequately recognized the poetics of survival that animates African being in hard times. This book provides a solid analysis of what these hard times are and the challenges they present, but it also foregrounds the poetic and imaginative ways in which African subjects seek a future outside the prison house of late capitalism.”—Simon Gikandi, from the foreword

“The contemporary refiguring of state and international structures has proliferated and amplified the social ecologies we used to call ‘margins,’ and the myriad local forms of innovation, perseverance, and entropy that have emerged under these conditions place new demands on our attentiveness as ethnographers. In their finely detailed attention to marginal spaces across the African continent and beyond, the essays in this volume engage in the essential work of connecting these new historical moments with the new theories needed for comprehending them.”—Jane I. Guyer, author of Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa