This multidisciplinary collection of essays addresses diverse performances, texts, and discourses stretching from Africa to the African diaspora. As a recent addition to the Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora series, it gives space to the work of new researchers as well as to material by established scholars. Chapters range from discussions of boundary disputes in Cameroon (Emmanuel M. Mbah) to representations of Africa in American cinema (Celeste A. Fisher) to the ways in which African bodies are homoeroticized in Trinidadian popular performances (Denise Amy-Rose Forbes-Erickson).

The category of popular culture is used to accommodate diverse African discourses – including marriage rites, judicial processes, and weekly markets – alongside more conventional fields of artistic representation, such as soap operas and satirical songs. In this way, the book repositions popular representation in a sphere that is greater than aestheticized performance. African popular culture, contributors imply, must not be viewed through the same lens as the continent's popular art forms.

In defining ‘popular culture’ in the introduction, Toyin Falola and Augustine Agwuele are careful to avoid binary oppositions, particularly the reductive categories of traditional versus modern, grassroots versus elite, local versus global, and artisanal versus mass-produced. They highlight the ways in which apparent distinctions – such as that between ‘the modern, the westernized, and the traditional’ (p. 10) – are not rigid, nor stable, but are generated within local cultures as reactions and responses to political crises or social transformations. Confronting the complexities involved in maintaining a dynamic definition of popular culture, the editors offer a historically nuanced understanding of the social processes, population movements, and aesthetic forms that, over time, generate and transform African cultures. As historians of politics and culture, Falola and Agwuele argue that to study African popular culture is to document the ‘existential quests and aspirations’ of individuals in relation to groups (p. 3). Always vital, always responsive, African popular cultures are the means through which individuals and groups can participate in processes for ‘debating and negotiating norms and values’ (p. 4).

The combination of a historical and a functional approach in the book sometimes generates an over-utilitarian view of African popular cultures, in which every act or gesture is found to have an accessible source and a practical explanation. Where this method fails, the inexplicable becomes an obstacle, as for Tokunbo A. Ayoola, who repeatedly describes as ‘strange’ and ‘difficult to surmise’ the appearance of Tortoise trickster tales in Nigerian railway-workers' newsletters in the 1950s (p. 303). Nevertheless, many contributors, including Ayoola, offer incisive accounts of particular moments of cultural production. For example, Antoinette Tidjani Alou gives a richly detailed ethnographic analysis of the judicial ritual of Tunguma, in which legal cases are brought before a powerful stone. With similar attention to detail, Arinpe Adejumo writes on ‘Family health awareness in popular Yoruba arts’, focusing on how ‘traditional’ performers have been recruited by national organizations to record popular radio and television dramas containing ‘informational drama sketches’ about the spread and prevention of HIV/AIDS (p. 262). Actively preaching against customary medical treatments, performers nevertheless use ‘traditional’ poetry, song, and dance forms for the dissemination of the health campaigners' messages.

Many of the 13 essays in the volume offer similarly detailed case studies of the ways in which popular cultural forms provide vehicles for local resistance: to colonial rule, to processes of global standardization, to the postcolonial state, and to so-called customary beliefs and codes of behaviour. Overall, what the collection reveals is that Africans of all social classes and locations are tactical users of popular discourses, with the capacity to appropriate and subvert institutional practices and representations through their consumption or production of popular forms. Indeed, no popular discourse is regarded as oppressive in the volume. Even that most hegemonic of American soap operas, The Bold and the Beautiful, is found by Maurice N. Amutabi to have a positive, transformative effect in Kenya, opening up egalitarian debates about sexual equality and male domination (p. 209). Overall, therefore, the emphasis of the collection is upon popular culture as a field for negotiation rather than as a source of social tension or conflict. Once again, Toyin Falola and his colleagues have produced an original, thought-provoking anthology packed with methodological and definitional challenges for scholars in the field.