The provocation at the heart of Stephanie Newell's Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos is that dirt is so much more than the opposite of clean. In ten chapters that read briskly, the book takes dirt beyond its function as the residual term in a set of binaries used to define bodies, behaviors, and objects as disposable, immoral, and waste.

More specifically, the book uses the category of dirt to launch an excavation of Lagos’ modern history. It opens in the mid-1920s with a colonial official pronouncing Lagos ‘a town of unspeakable squalor’ and ends with the discourse of uncleanliness used to exclude queer experiences from contemporary political life in Nigeria (1). Connecting these vastly different historical contexts, Histories of Dirt traces the various attempts of colonial powers and postcolonial authorities to shape urban life by influencing people's imagination of dirt and its impact on their lives. In general, the book is more focused on how ideas about dirt are produced, circulated, archived, and validated as truth in media, as opposed to dirt as an empirical substance. Media is one of the key discursive technologies through which dirt goes from being a mere fact of urban life to being embodied in the language and image of exclusion, which is then co-opted for the disciplinary and biopolitical uses of power. In colonial Lagos, for example, African-owned newspapers published in English and Yoruba shaped ideas about hygiene and public health. They provided a stage for what the book terms ‘unofficial publics’ to engage with colonial policies on dirt and the shaping of urban life (46). These newspapers did not always capture the pure, unfiltered voices of the people, but they offered a space where the politics, culture, and morality of dirt could be negotiated.

Attempting to tell the history of an African city through the image of dirt is a tricky thing to do, especially when the study depends heavily on colonial archives. In less careful hands, a project such as this could easily become a rehearsing of painful colonial images of racism or a tone-deaf amplification of poverty porn. But from the opening of Newell's book, it is made clear that despite taking the colonial archive as the starting point, the goal is to ‘read for African perspectives’ within these archives (11). This objective shapes the way the book is organized. While the first few chapters look at dirt in colonial archives and Nigerian newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the later chapters offer a study of dirt in postcolonial Lagos using interviews with everyday Lagosians. In the opening chapters, the book shows how colonial policies about town planning are made on the basis of myths about ‘the dirty natives’ (7). But, when Lagosians talk about dirt in the city, they strike a much different tone. The last four chapters capture this difference by demonstrating how Lagosians use dirt as a complex language for multicultural encounters, as opposed to a reductive binary of us versus them. By juxtaposing the colonial archive and the voices of present-day Lagosians, Histories of Dirt stages a discursive standoff in which contemporary Lagosians provide a counterpoint to colonial distortions of the city. The many interviews incorporated in the later chapters work well at the level of form in the sense that the reader can essentially hear the voices of Lagosians drowning out the earlier colonial utterances with their far more ‘relativistic understanding of dirt’ (101).

Some of the striking moments in Histories of Dirt have to do with how dirt plays into the desire to exclude something or someone. In the critique of the now-infamous 2010 British Broadcasting Company's Welcome to Lagos (a documentary on landfills in Lagos as ‘macabre dystopias’ [120]), the portrait of Agbepoo (a scatological figure in urban Nigerian life, invented by colonialism and spurned by Nigerians), analysis of the discourse on Ebola, and the discrimination against same-sex love in Nigeria public discourse, Newell's book illuminates familiar figures of Lagos life in ways that are generative for historians, as well as urban studies and literary scholars.

The book is impactful across these disciplines, in part, because of the method used to assemble its wide-ranging analyses. In Histories of Dirt, dirt is treated as a genealogical term in the Foucauldian sense. In other words, the book uses the figure of dirt to reveal new contexts of intelligibility for a history of Lagos. Simply by articulating various representations of dirt in the modern life of the city, the book assembles an expansive collection of fascinating texts and makes connections between disparate historical moments. This enables, for example, the possibility of drawing correspondences between the figure of the dirty native towards the end of the nineteenth century and the figure of the unclean queer body a century later so that we can better understand the context of their invention and use to decide who gets to be excluded from the city's political life.

Dirt is an indicator of difference, making it particularly generative in the study of various politics of exclusion. Newell's book is focused on Lagos and Nigerian history, but its references are wider. It ranges from colonial rule to the exclusion of queer lives from postcolonial states, but also the Rwandan genocide, Nazi anti-Semitism, and the recent spate of xenophobia in South Africa. The book looks at how we go from individual beliefs about the presumed dirtiness of others and end up with ‘life threatening forms of anti-humanism’ (162). In working out the terms for ‘a politics and poetics of dirt’ (12), Histories of Dirt is a helpful manual for how dirt, as a word, an object, and a discourse, can be used to constitute archives, influence public opinion, and spark imagination.