The polysemic and politically charged notion of dirt offers an entry point into a history of planning and public health in Lagos, and a meditation on the role of public discourse in shaping cosmopolitan city life. Stephanie Newell’s Histories of Dirt is a formidable accomplishment of interdisciplinary scholarship and storytelling. It is also effectively three books condensed into one. The first is about what dirt means in the Lagos context, the social imaginaries it conjures, and the political work it does. The second is about the contested role of public health in shaping the city, the relations and differentiations that it enacted under colonial rule, and their afterlives in the contemporary metropolis. The third, final, ‘book’ is about urban mediations. It explores how different media shape perceptions of otherness, and how these media have historically been articulated to vernacular cultures.
These three strands of discussion and argument are beautifully woven through a chronological and thematic structure, one that begins with British colonial settlement and ends with recent debates around Western media representations of Lagos, waste treatment and the regulation of ‘homosexuality’ (a category that Newell rightly problematizes). The kaleidoscopic nature of Newell’s inquiry, which stems from the ERC-funded Cultural Politics of Dirt project, makes the book relevant for anthropologists, historians, and urban and media scholars, who will each find something of value, while also wishing that their longstanding disciplinary debates were more closely engaged with those things.
The book begins with a focus on urban planning and public health (Chapters 1–3), with a robust critique of the racist ‘antihumanism’ that underpinned colonial policies. While this is not my area of expertise, I suspect that scholars working on colonial urbanisms in Africa will find much that is familiar in these chapters. A notable contribution, however, is Chapter 3’s discussion of how Lagosian elites used print media to intervene in public discourses around health and ‘dirt’. By drawing from the archives of the Nigerian Pioneer, the chapter shows that some conservative elites adopted British tropes of dirt and disease to distinguish themselves from poorer residents, setting the stage for postcolonial class conflicts.
Concerns with public health then fade into the background in the middle chapters (Chapters 4 and 5), which dwell on how media and popular perception have historically been connected. These chapters offer convincing reflections on how to recover subaltern African perspectives in colonial archives (including archives left by elitist publications such as the Nigerian Pioneer). They also explore how to parse colonial legacies in contemporary popular discourse. Their analysis of audience responses to screenings by the British Colonial Film Unit is superb, with a particularly striking discussion of the opacity and disruptive force of public laughter. The chapters offer a passionate argument for taking audiences’ interpretative agency seriously. This will be familiar to media studies scholars but remains all too relevant given the rigid, didactic tendencies of public health and other ‘development’ campaigns on the African continent.
In response to the regular erasure of African audience agency in media campaigns (and in some historical and anthropological scholarship too), Chapter 6 elaborates a conception of ‘public opinion’, trying to uncover contemporary Lagosians’ perceptions of dirt. This is possibly one of the least convincing elements of Newell’s analysis. As a concept geared towards quantitative studies, public opinion does a disservice to the situated nature of the otherwise thorough qualitative research that Newell and her Lagos-based team undertook. In Chapters 7 and 8 (on waste and ‘homosexuality’ respectively), Newell is of course careful to highlight the diversity inherent in public opinion (for example, discussing the role of religion, generation, gender and class in shaping some perceptions). She insists that public opinion is fluid and relatively autonomous vis-à-vis mediated elite discourses (such as politicians’ stigmatization of ‘homosexuals’ in their speeches). Yet the clunky, encompassing notion of public opinion leads Newell to tack constantly between generalizing statements and an acknowledgement that it is impossible to write of a singular, let alone unified, perspective on dirt in Lagos.
The shifting focus of the book’s three parts can be challenging for the reader. It makes it difficult to pin down a set of overarching arguments, although the short conclusion is effective in this regard. The attempt to speak to three big concepts – dirt, media, urban life – inevitably means that the space to address each, and their interrelations, is limited. For example, there is little explicit sense of how the book contributes to longstanding anthropological work on dirt; likewise, it does not respond to burgeoning scholarship on the urban–media nexus.
Still, the book is exemplary for the fluidity of its narrative arc, for its methodological reflexivity, for its detailed attention to vernacular language, and for its richly textured, polyphonic portrait of Lagos as a (post)colonial metropolis. By eschewing a central, driving line of argument, the book reveals the creative potentials opened up by interdisciplinary study and makes a distinctive contribution to the renewal of African urban and media studies.
