As the African continent becomes increasingly urbanized, the academic study of African cities has never been more important. Ato Quayson's timely book, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, is firmly grounded in the history of the urban area in question and rooted in the lived realities of city residents. Quayson's goal, is to provide a deeper retelling of Accra's social history by exploiting this main street's connection to various ‘spatial ecologies’. For him, the geographic location and recent history of Oxford Street (a section of Accra's Cantonments Road possibly nicknamed for its cousin to the north) links it to a long-standing pattern of local and transnational forces simultaneously shaping the city.

Oxford Street, Accra is divided into two parts. The first, ‘Horizontal Archaeologies', draws metaphorically from the analytical practices of archeologists wherein a fragment discovered in the field delivers meaning to the contemporary observer when it is connected to a wider system of symbols in the relevant ancient society. Chapters One and Three, this section's core chapters, treat two ancient Accra neighborhoods as fragments through which to examine identity formation in the city. Chapter One, which is grounded in Ga Mashie, the historical core of Accra, asks how manumitted slaves from Brazil and their descendants, referred to locally as the Tabon, became accepted as part of the indigenous Ga ethnicity, while retaining their Brazilian heritage. Chapter Three performs a similar operation on the emergence of Danish Euro-Africans in the Accra neighborhood of Osu, additionally accounting for the role of race and skin color in the formation of hybrid identities. Chapter Two fleshes out the book's first half by describing how policies and commercial activity in the colonial era shaped the city as it grew around Ga Mashie through a process of aggregation.

In the second part of Oxford Street, Accra, which he calls ‘Morphologies of Everyday Life’, Quayson deploys ethnographic methods in a series of Accra's social spaces. The core chapters here are Chapter Five on salsa dancing and Chapter Six on ‘gymming’. For the cosmopolitan Accra residents we are introduced to in Chapter Five, salsa dancing is a conduit to transnational flows of people and ideas. Working out at the gym, on the other hand, provides the individuals described in Chapter Six with a means of fostering self-transformation and a sense of belonging in the city. Chapter Four examines the inscriptions on the local, privately-operated buses – tro-tros – and the billboard advertisements deployed by Accra's flourishing cell phone companies. Chapter Seven draws on the author's background as a literary critic to examine the significance of protagonists’ movement through urban spaces in Accra (the spatial traversal) in several works of literature, particularly the texts of Amma Darko and Kofi Awoonor.

The approach that Quayson takes in this book is determinedly interdisciplinary and the book is stronger for it. Oxford Street is particularly successful in adapting the writings of urban theorists such as David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre to the particularities of Accra, while expanding beyond the limits of their concepts. In Chapter Two, for instance, Quayson's concept of aggregation extends Harvey's notion of the spatial fix beyond Marxist analysis by accounting for inter-ethnic relationships and colonial dynamics.

Certainly, the most pressing question that can be raised about this book is whether Oxford Street is as central to Quayson's analysis as the book's title and introduction suggest. Outside of the introduction, where he describes the improvisational practices at play on the street, and Chapter Four, where the street's visual culture is analyzed, much of the book takes place beyond Oxford Street. The author's intent is that we view the street as an urban fragment that leads us on a path to the wider system of meaning presented in the rest of the book. But the connection between those strongly-written chapters and Oxford Street is not readily apparent. In that sense, the book's title could mislead the prospective reader. One wonders if Oxford Street should have been simultaneously demoted as the book's thematic device and promoted by expanding the discussion of its vibrant urbanscape in the introduction into a standalone chapter in Part II (‘Morphologies of Everyday Life’). Such a move would have encouraged the author to carry the theme implied in the book's subtitle, ‘City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism’, more forcefully throughout the book. Nevertheless, Quayson has superseded his goal of forestalling a superficial reading of Oxford Street as a mere outpost of globalization by giving readers a deep understanding of the whole of Accra, its history, and its spatial practices.