Enchantings: Modernity, Culture, and the State in Postcolonial Africa

“The crisis of the African state” is an old but still current formulation. The symposium holds that that crisis is not simply social, which involves statistics about governance, poverty, corruption, etc., and imply government policies of redress, but also epistemological, which involves deep apprehension of the state’s nature, its particular meanings to the people it rules, its history, functions, and transformations over time.