The book Naked Agency digs into the historicity of women disrobing as a weapon against tyranny in Africa. Exploring precolonial to postcolonial eras on the continent, it approaches from a cosmological viewpoint to conceptualize the traditional power held in a woman’s body as both life giving and taking, both womb and grave. The biopolitics of women defiantly disrobing equates to an arsenal in times of war. The author introduced the book by debunking certain scholarships that are “concerned with and anxious to correct the disempowering images of local and global media of African women as victimized by their traditions” (14). Rather, she contests lack of agency on the one hand and the romanticization of African women’s agency by scholars who are eager to redefine African feminism in the face of narratives of helplessness. However, she looks at women’s agency not only from the perspective of the women but the reactions of their target to arrive at an understanding of the cultural implication and complexities of disrobing and why it requires closer scholarly attention.

The sectioning of Naked Agency into three namely “Restriction,” “Co-optation,” and “Repression” helps to conceptualize the ambiguity of naked agency. The section title allows the reader to follow a trajectory of the overall argument made in the book. Instead of using chapters in each section, the author used scenes to further contextualize the performance of disrobing in particular contexts, explaining that the reactions and result of disrobing depend on the circumstances at the time of action. This also has the effect of debunking the idea of a unified, coherent African culture. Though postcolonial and colonial situations are similar, cultural differences provide the nuances for the understanding of women agency in different African communities. By extension, she sets a standard for researching the “African culture” by combing out these cultural differences and their implications for academia. With a mixed method of textual analysis validated by ethnography, Naked Agency stands out among most scholarships that employ either one or the other, to arrive at a contextually nuanced epistemology.

Section 1 introduces the desperate conditions that warrant women disrobing—public officials contest neoliberal practices (Cote d’Ivoire), imported toxic pollution (in Cote d’Ivoire, oil spillage in Nigeria), mismanagement of pandemics, rebel groups (boko haram in Nigeria)—and questions the autonomy of the women in making the decision to disrobe by referencing the documentary Uku, Hamba’Ze (To Walk Naked), which is about women in South Africa protesting against the demolition of their houses. The scenes in Section 2, “Africanizing Nakedness as (Self) Instrumentation, “In the Name of National Interest and Film as Instrumental,” and “Interpretive Lens,” conflate to push the argument of the ambivalence of naked agency as political instrumentation, exploitation, and affirmative self- agency, criticizing the simplistic and condescending reading of disrobing of African women as backward and shameful. Section 3 details the rejection of traditional religious practices in which defiant disrobing is situated. Binaries such as “barbaric vs. civilized, Africa vs. France, village vs. cities, immigrant vs host country, unsophisticated African women vs. democratic institutions, superstitious vs. political rationality, fail to account for [African] women’s organizational abilities and political awareness” (136, 137). It also questions the role of the media in the extraction of these acts from their frameworks of relevance, therefore, emphasizing the urgency of rewriting the African story by Africans, not for romanticization but for contextualizing cultural practices, the good and the bad, the stale and the relevant. In the introductory part of the book, the author rejects the use of the phrase “genital cursing” (2) as employed by the media and scholars to describe instances of disrobing in Africa, but the same is still used as part of the title on the front page of the book. There is an overlap in the use of genital cursing and naked agency in the book, but this does not in any way obfuscate the overall analysis. It would, however, have been an easier read if the terms were clearly defined considering the time lapse between the events described in the book and when it was published. It is easy for an outsider to conflate the form of naked agency described here with being “merely one more spectacle of sexualization and globalization” (195).

This notwithstanding, Naked Agency is a great book, densely written and highly theoretically researched from postcolonial theory to feminism to globalization to film study and performance, with examples from selected African countries, African literature, and popular culture, giving a balanced reading of the multiple layers of the postcolonial condition and conditioning. The tripartite analytical approach adopted by the author—“descriptive, interpretative, and theoretical” (4) allows for an objective interpretation of the events described in Naked Agency. This book is recommended for any scholar who wishes to avoid, reiterating Chimamanda Adichie’s popular Ted Talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” which renders women in Africa as passive or romanticizes the reach of their influence. The author takes us through the history and circumstances of the act of disrobing, and how traditional practices generally, not just disrobing, has been pushed aside in favor of Western culture and legitimized way of seeking redress. The rejection of such traditional ways of forcing accountability in leadership has encouraged the perpetuation of criminal offenses by people in positions of authority. It also serves as a reminder to scholars of contemporary naked exposure of the central place of African women in the discourse, not at the end of the table. Naked Agency questions how much of interaction and systems of knowledge globalization is ready for. Naminata Diabate clarifies with a simple question in this era of globalization, post modernism, and diversity: “What space is made for people who still value the symbolic and the figurative? (166). I hope this book helps reconstruct and decolonize the mind of the West about the cultural practices of the other.