Performing Power in Nigeria: Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism

Description

For decades, Pentecostalism has been one of the most powerful socio-cultural and socio-political movements in Africa. The Pentecostal modes of constructing the world by using their performative agencies to embed their rites in social processes have imbued them with immense cultural power to contour the character of their societies. Performing Power in Nigeria explores how Nigerian Pentecostals mark their self-distinction as a people of power within a social milieu that affirmed and contested their desires for being. Their faith, and the various performances that inform it, imbue the social matrix with saliences that also facilitate their identity of power. Using extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork, Abimbola A. Adelakun questions the histories, desires, knowledge, tools, and innate divergences of this form of identity, and its interactions with the other ideological elements that make up the society. Analysing the important developments in contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism, she demonstrates how the social environment is being transformed by the Pentecostal performance of their identity as the people of power.

Abimbola A. Adelakun is Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin where her research focuses on the politics and performances of Pentecostalism. She is the author of articles in journals including the Journal of Women and Religion, Jenda: Journal of Culture and African Women Studies and co-editor of Art, Creativity, and Politics in Africa and the Diaspora (2018).

'The book treads new ground, bringing religion and performance studies into a richly creative tete-a-tete, in which performing Nigerian Pentecostalism translates lived imagination, experience, and praxis into sacred reality. Spiritual power and temporal politics are acted out via the aestheticization and dramatization of Pentecostalism, thus giving it a unique religious niche and identity.' Afe Adogame, Princeton Theological Seminary 'This book boldly expands the disciplinary frontiers of Pentecostal studies from anthropology, history and political theory into performance studies, focusing on its creative and dramaturgical expressions of power. This approach and the insightful analysis it generates will no doubt appeal to scholars of Nigerian Pentecostalism from various disciplines.' Olufunke Adeboye, University of Lagos 'Performing Power in Nigeria is an excellent study of religion and Pentecostalism in contemporary Nigeria. Drawing from her brilliant scholarship on performance and creative expressions of culture and power, Abimbola Adelakun provides a splendid analysis of the spectacular display of Pentecostal spiritual power and identity.' Annalisa Butticci, Georgetown University