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)

9781009281744, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 7 September 2023

300 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.44 kg

'This book is important for two reasons, one is the way it explores identity and performance of power in Nigerian Pentecostalism. Second, in how it traces this power through social and political contexts including the entertainment industry. The book will be a worthwhile read for Pentecostal scholars in African Pentecostalism and Global Pentecostalism and scholars interested in the arts and culture.' Mookgo Solomon Kgatle, Journal of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

For decades, Pentecostalism has been one of the most powerful socio-cultural and socio-political movements in Africa. 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. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]