Toyin Falola's edited volume, Èṣù: Yoruba God, Power, and the Imaginative Frontiers, serves as an extensive study of this Yorùbá deity, who embodies and embraces change, uncertainty, paradox, and hybridity. The 19 chapters within this volume, many of which were written by scholars of Yorùbá descent, provide important insight for those seeking to deepen their understanding of Yorùbá religion, history, and philosophy. By including scholars from various disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, this book organizes the debates surrounding Èṣù and contributes to an understanding of his role in Yorùbá spirituality, art, and identity formation.

For this reason, Falola organizes the volume using a two-part thematic structure that explores how Èṣù influences, and is influenced by, Yorùbá people's historical and contemporary processes of migration, socio-religious change, and cultural reinterpretation. The chapters address these processes' effects on his invocations in secular, scholarly, and religious realms; they also explicate Èṣù's function in the adaptation of Yorùbá identity, politics, and cultural practices in multiple locales throughout the Atlantic. Indeed, as Falola explains in his opening chapter, ‘Èṣù, the master of the crossroads, enters the center in the marketplace of ideas and culture, to become the confluence between the Yoruba in Africa and the Yoruba elsewhere, and between the Yoruba of old and the Yoruba of new’ (p. 17).

The seven chapters in Part One, entitled ‘Religious and Spiritual Forces’, consider these adaptations in the context of Yorùbá religion, ritual, and ideology. Many of these chapters adopt an ethnographic approach, drawing from mythology, ritual praxis, and history to address Èṣù's function in articulating Yorùbá notions of morality. Through their analyses, these scholars rescue Èṣù from his contemporary mischaracterization as an evil force. This perception arose from Christian evangelists' Yorùbá translation of the English Bible, which equated Èṣù with the Devil. These chapters show that, despite the influence of such dualistic notions, the deity continues to play an important role in Yorùbá people's secular and religious lives. In this regard, dele jegede's (sic) chapter is noteworthy. jegede explores how political projects and social tensions both affect, and are affected by, the perception and practice of divination. Using a pastor and a babaláwo (a Yorùbá divination priest) as case studies, jegede argues that Èṣù's function in divination is the methodological foundation for prophetic praxis in Nigerian Pentecostal churches. jegede explains that Èṣù ‘is the embodiment of spirituality – of truthfulness, faithfulness, and loyalty – the neglect of which often meets with unmitigated consequences' (p. 169). Both Èṣù and prophets serve as tools that religious groups use to help individuals or communities regain equilibrium; they provide prognoses and prescriptions for problems, threatening recourse if appropriate action is not taken. jegede negates the notion that Èṣù is evil; moreover, he illustrates the deity's ability to continue to provide hope for people during difficult times, thus demonstrating Èṣù's continuing relevance in contemporary Lagos.

Part Two, ‘Modernity, Representations, and Imaginations’, explores the ways in which Èṣù emerges as a trope through which people remember, explain, and reinvent historical processes of migration and hybrid identity formation in contemporary, Afro-Atlantic creative production. Some of these chapters focus on literary, artistic, performative, or musical forms that reflect Èṣù's transformation – and his transformative function – in diasporic communities; others examine how Yorùbá artists themselves turn to Èṣù as a way to make sense of their hybrid identities in the diaspora. In this section, Solimar Otero's contribution is particularly insightful. Drawing from Latino/a scholarship to explore Afro-Atlantic ritual in New Orleans, Otero contends that Èṣù's symbols serve as a circum-Atlantic language that migrates between cultural spaces throughout the diaspora. She suggests that the performative element within rituals for Èṣù enables practitioners to grapple with past and present migration and adaptation. By providing indeterminate spaces in which these circum-Atlantic rituals occur, Èṣù serves as an interlocutor between worlds and provides a ‘methodology for complex cultural fusion, disambiguation, and negotiation’ (p. 208).

Many of the chapters, especially in Part One, give only brief explanations about particular Yorùbá religious concepts, making it difficult for undergraduate students and non-specialized readers to grasp much of the nuance that naturally characterizes discourses surrounding Èṣù. With that in mind, however, it seems as though Chapter Four, with its section informing readers of the location of Yorùbáland and Yorùbá population sizes in West Africa and the diaspora, would have been better situated earlier in the collection to complement Falola's opening chapter. Still, such variability allows the essays to stand alone for use at various levels of undergraduate/graduate instruction and scholarly discussion. Further, by refusing to consider Èṣù within distinct temporal, disciplinary, or geographical confines, the volume embraces the hybridity and boundlessness of the deity himself, thus contributing to its value. As Falola reminds us about Èṣù's place in the contemporary world, so too is it the case in this volume: ‘Èṣù remains with us!’ (p. 25).