Verlag:
Rowman & Littlefield International, New York, NY
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...
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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 endeavors. 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 Belief and Historical Experience: The State as HermeneusConclusion; Chapter 6 The State in Transition; Of Sovereignty and Stateness; Centralization and Consolidation: The Colonial Encounter; The Post-independence State: Governance and Cultural Bricolage; Thomas Sankara and the Conceptualization of African Revolutionary Modernity; Problematized Statehood: Divergences and Dislocations; Recentring the Debate: Three Propositions; Conclusion; Appendix: Glossary of Mooré Terms; Bibliography; Index Cover; Half Title; Series Information; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgements; Chapter 1 Political History as State Ideology; Introduction; State(ness) as Historicity: A Misreading; State Failure and Other Debilities: A Review; Failed-State Literature; (Neo)patrimonialist Literature; Interventionist Literature; Un-understanding the State; The State in Transition: A Proposal; The Naam and Tenga : A Normative Order and Its Legitimation; Chapter 2 The Trail of the Horse; Introduction; The Ecology of Social Organization Land Gods and Territorial Occupation: Mediating Social PhenomenaRitual Locales and Sovereignty; Subjectivities of Intersection; Constitutional Practice and Authority in a Decentralized Society; Of Politics and the Political; Schmitt and the Theological State; Conclusion; Chapter 4 Statization and Centralizing Processes in Eighteenth-Century Moogo; Introduction; Frontiermen as State-Builders; Myths of Origin in Moogo; The Ends of Power; Statization as Divorce of Kingship from Kinship; The Naam , Jural Corporateness and Rog-n-miki; Frames of Interdependence; Earthpriests; Blacksmiths Of Codes of Hospitality and Social IntegrationBeing and Becoming Moaga; Moos bûudu; The Ethics of Othering: Identity and Centralization; Forms of Integration; Pogsiure , or Deferred Exchange in Women; Of Slaves, Captives and Systems of Servitude; Conclusion; Chapter 5 Rituals as Political References; Introduction; Withdrawal of the High God as a Process of Socialization of Belief; Proposition of Power and Principles; The Dual Principle as Model: Ringu , or History Transacted; Sacred Kingship: The Political in the Ritual; Divine Reference and Historical Initiative Social Formation at the Intersection of Mobility and EncounterThe Voltaic Region: A Common Culture-Area; Generic Construct: Of Stranger-Kings and Accomodating Natives; The Political Economy of a State Formation; Gradations of Stateness; Mamprugu: The Core State; The Mossi States of Ouagadougou/Yatenga: Steady Statization; Dagbon: A Mobile kingdom; Dagara/Dagaaba/Dagao: Uneven Statelessness; What to Make of All This?; Conclusion; Chapter 3 The Time/Space Dynamics of the Constitution of the Political; Introduction; Spatial Occupation and/as the Ethics of Being/Relating