Includes bibliographical references and index.

Notes on contributors -- Foreword by Patrick Chabal -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Introduction: African resistance in an age of fractured sovereignty / Wendy Willems and Ebenezer Obadare -- Part I. Postcolonial state formation & parallel infrastructures. 2. Global technologies of domination: from colonial encounters to the Arab Spring / Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni -- 3. Citizenship from below: the politics of citizen action & resistance in South Africa & Angola / Bettina von Lieres -- Part II. Embodied modes of resistance & the postcolonial state. 4. The politics of confinement & mobility: informality, relocations & urban re-making from above & below in Nairobi / Ilda Lindell and Markus Ihalainen. -- 5. Overcoming socio-economic marginalisation: Young West African hustlers & the reinvention of global capitalism / Basile Ndjio -- 6. Accepting authoritarianism? Everyday resistance as political consciousness in post-genocide Rwanda / Susan Thomson -- Part III. Popular culture as discursive forms of resistance. 7. Participatory politics in South Africa: social commentary from above & resistance from below / Innocentia J. Mhlambi -- 8. Laughing at the rainbow's cracks? Blackness, whiteness & the ambivalences of South African stand-up comedy / Grace A. Musila -- 9. 'Beasts of no nation': Resistance & civic activism in Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's music / Jendele Hungbo -- Part IV. Publics as everyday sites of resistance. 10. The power of resonance: Music, local radio stations, & the sounds of cultural belonging in Mali / Dorothea Schulz -- 11. Narrating the contested public sphere: Zapiro, Zuma & freedom of expression in South Africa / Daniel Hammett -- Index.

"The recent eruption of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle East has reopened academic debate on the meaning and strategies of resistance in the 21st century. This book argues that Western notions of state and civil society provide only a limited understanding of how power and resistance operate in the African context, where informality is central to the way both state officials and citizens exercise agency. With the principle of informality as a template, the chapters in this volume collectively examine the various modes - organised and unorganised, formal and informal, urban and rural, embodied and discursive, serious and ludic, online and offline, successful and failing - through which Africans contend with power. Resistance takes place against the backdrop of deep fractures in state sovereignty, the remnants of colonial rule and the constraints of a global, neoliberal economic system." --Publisher website.