Performing Power in Nigeria
Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism

Uses extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork to explore how Nigerian Pentecostals mark their self-distinction as a people of power.

Abimbola A. Adelakun (Author)

9781108831079, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 November 2021

290 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.1 cm, 0.58 kg

'Performing Power in Nigeria is an excellent study of religion and Pentecostalism in contemporary Nigeria. Drawing from her brilliant scholarship on performance and creative expressions of culture and power, Abimbola Adelakun provides a splendid analysis of the spectacular display of Pentecostal spiritual power and identity.' Annalisa Butticci, Georgetown University

For decades, Pentecostalism has been one of the most powerful socio-cultural and socio-political movements in Africa. The Pentecostal modes of constructing the world by using their performative agencies to embed their rites in social processes have imbued them with immense cultural power to contour the character of their societies. Performing Power in Nigeria explores how Nigerian Pentecostals mark their self-distinction as a people of power within a social milieu that affirmed and contested their desires for being. Their faith, and the various performances that inform it, imbue the social matrix with saliences that also facilitate their identity of power. Using extensive archival material, interviews and fieldwork, Abimbola A. Adelakun questions the histories, desires, knowledge, tools, and innate divergences of this form of identity, and its interactions with the other ideological elements that make up the society. Analysing the important developments in contemporary Nigerian Pentecostalism, she demonstrates how the social environment is being transformed by the Pentecostal performance of their identity as the people of power.

Introduction
1. Demons and Deliverance: Discourses on Pentecostal Character
2. 'What Islamic devils?!': Power Struggles, Race, and Christian Trans-nationalism
3. 'Touch not Mine Anointed': #MeToo, #ChurchToo, and the Power of 'See Finish'
4. 'Everything Christianity/the Bible Represents is being Attacked on the Internet!': The Internet and Technologies of Religious Engagement
5. 'God too laughs and we can laugh too': The Ambivalent Power of Comedy Performances in the Church
6. 'The Spirit Names the Child': Pentecostal Futurity in the Name of Jesus
Conclusion: Power Must Change Hands: COVID 19, Power, and the Imperative of Knowledge.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Religion & politics [HRAM2], African history [HBJH]