This book breaches a delicate terrain and starts a discussion that is important for all scholars (and beyond) in African studies, as it deals with fundamental questions regarding the epistemology of studying ‘Africa’ and its implications. I want to emphasize the wider implications of this book as I can imagine that many scholars would easily skip over a title that speaks of African luxury and which seems to be of little relevance to the study of agriculture, literature or political systems, to name a few other areas in African studies. The vantage point of luxury starts a discussion on wealth, expanding the regular frame of studying the politics of poverty and (rising) inequality. This is a courageous move. By focusing on what can be considered the more frivolous features of life, it presents us with critical dilemmas and partly uncovers normative foundations on which much of African studies rests.

The book is an edited volume of nine chapters, starting with an introduction by the editors Simidele Dosekun and Mehita Iqani in which they outline their agenda as ‘an exploratory approach, concerned precisely with that which emerges in the name of luxury’ (p. 5). They wish to move beyond the somewhat tiresome trope of interpreting wealth through conspicuous consumption and its (moral) implications.Footnote ¹ Luxury is an arena of friction, in Anna Tsing’s sense, and the analyses of the myriad frictions in the chapters range from stark local inequalities to global political interferences and scholarly production of knowledge. The book is divided into three sections that deal with: first, the mediated, especially visual, representations of luxury; second, the diverse material practices and forms of labour that shape and constitute it; and third, the spaces in which luxury is located and performed. The nine chapters vary widely in their scope and, although South Africa is somewhat overrepresented, the chapters deal with case studies from Angola, Congo, Nigeria, Togo and Zimbabwe.

The first part of the book takes up the questions of how neoliberal logics frame representations of a so-called new Africa, how they seep by ‘capillary’ actionFootnote ² into the structures of the social fabric, and as a result produce particular desires and distinctions. The three chapters by Mehita Iqani, Hlonipha Mokoena and Alexia Smit provide important insights into how longstanding racist and colonial notions are (re)produced and how local African cultures are ignored by the ethnocentric gaze of global structures and their local agents (Iqani and Mokoena). Smit’s chapter delves into the complicated matter of how hegemonic structures produce (new) desires and how these become locally appropriated and meaningful. While not denying the disrupting outcomes of contemporary global capitalist orthodoxy, this chapter and those in the second section also provide a wider perspective on the embodiment of neoliberalism beyond its ‘bad reputation’.Footnote ³

In fact, the book makes an important contribution to scholarship on Africa by addressing the limited reach of only studying the dark side of capitalism, which has its roots in early European luxury consumption and modernity, as the editors outline in their introduction. Especially when reading Ndapwa Alweendo and Simidele Dosekun’s chapter about the Luminance Boutique, a luxury store where only a small percentage of South African women can afford to shop, the importance of the book struck me. The ‘Luminance woman’ and her co-renegades across the continent tend to be described in the literature if not with incredulity then with derision. Terms such as ‘new money’ and ‘nouveau riche’, and discussions about the political indolence of the middle classes, harbour a moralizing view about Africans who are (relatively) wealthy. In contrast, Alweendo and Dosekun carefully analyse how black women’s unapologetic consumption is political, as they assert the right to consume what their (grand)mothers were denied and as they decide on their own trajectory in the post-apartheid transformation.

Such an analysis requires a non-moralizing approach and a non-polarizing view, where the authors expand on the interconnections of racializing imaginations, global inequalities and local formations. Amah Edoh provides a beautiful analysis of such an approach regarding the Dutch wax cloth brand Vlisco. The women about whom Edoh writes cannot simply be presented as victims of the current neoliberal turn the West African cloth industry takes. Simidele Dosekun’s chapter on a high-end concept store in Lagos called Alára and its interpretation of luxury as performance is probably the chapter that most provokes friction between perceiving neoliberal orthodoxy as disruption and including broader perspectives. A focus on luxury risks celebrating and hence reproducing privilege, and yet we must ask why that is problematic. Outlining such dilemmas is productive. In this regard, Pamila Gupta’s interesting chapter on the interconnections between makers and consumers could have pushed the analysis of stark inequalities a bit further. Claudia Gastrow analyses luxurious housing in Luanda that needs constant maintenance; she concludes that analyses of lavish housing as self-indulgence miss the point. Jonathan Cane’s chapter on decadent gardening by notorious presidents and consumers of almost obscene resorts deals with the intimate connection between the disquiet and decadence of luxury.

This book stares back at the reader and asks: ‘Why is it uncomfortable to read about luxury in Africa?’ This is a significant question, as most (global, Western-based) researchers enjoy luxury in Africa when visiting a hotel for a good dinner, going on a safari in a national park, or swimming in an international hotel after a sweaty day of fieldwork. I see these widely different contributions on luxury as the start of a conversation to rethink our research agendas and theoretical repertoires away from the more deficient aspects of life as the only legitimate focus of research in and of ‘Africa’ to include uncomfortable questions and dilemmas.