State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. vii + 323 pp. Photographs. Bibliographical References. Notes. Index. $40.00. Paper. ISBN: 9780253029980 .

Olaniyan Tejumola. State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. vii + 323 pp. Photographs. Bibliographical References. Notes. Index. $40.00. Paper. ISBN: 9780253029980.

In a pragmatic re-framing of the African postcolonial process, Tejumola Olaniyan and the contributing authors of State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings describe the extraordinary, and academically unattended, cultural cross-section of the African postcolonial state. Breaking from traditional, and often detrimental, analytical approaches which consider the postcolonial state in separate elements, such as isolated political commentary or a narrow discussion on the end results of socioeconomic status, Olaniyan and the contributors demand (and deliver) an epistemological re-conceptualization of the state as a holistic and culturally created, comprised, and sustained process. The repressive institutional processes of the state have engendered a postcolonial generation of creative cultural productivity (5), but this nuanced influence has yet to be integrated into analyses of the state.

This volume, illustratively selected and logically ordered, provides a paradigmatic remedy to the disjointed and compartmentalized standing discussion of the processes of the state by first anchoring the reader in...