When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust. According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from its many diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation. The Pan-African Nation unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points towards a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.

Demonstrating how political culture facilitates or distorts political preferences and political outcomes, this book explores how the historical development of social conditions and the current social structures shape understandings and constrain individual and collective actions within the Nigerian political system. Political Culture, Change, and Security Policy examines the extent to which specific norms and socialization processes within the political and civic culture abet corruption or the proclivity to engage in corrupt practices and how they help reinforce political attitudes and civic norms that have the potential to undermine the effectiveness of government. It also delineates specific doctrinal models and strategic framework essential to the development and implementation of Nigeria’s national security policy, as well as innovative approaches to national development planning. Professor Kalu N. Kalu offers an exhaustive study that integrates several quantitative models in addressing a series of theoretical and empirical questions that inform historical and contemporary issues of the Nigerian project. The general premise is that it is not enough to simply highlight the problems of the state and address the what question, we must also address the why and how questions that drive political change, policy preferences, and competing political outcomes.

Students and other interested readers will learn about all major aspects of Nigerian culture and customs, including the land, peoples, and brief historical overview; religion and world view; literature and media; art and architecture/housing; cuisine and traditional dress; gender, marriage, and family; social customs and lifestyles; and music and dance.".

How does social media activism in Nigeria intersect with online popular forms—from GIFs to memes to videos—and become shaped by the repressive postcolonial state that propels resistance to dominant articulations of power? James Yékú proposes the concept of "cultural netizenship"—internet citizenship and its aesthetico-cultural dimensions—as a way of being on the social web and articulating counter-hegemonic self-presentations through viral popular images. Yékú explores the cultural politics of protest selfies, Nollywood-derived memes and GIFs, hashtags, and political cartoons as visual texts for postcolonial studies, and he examines how digital subjects in Nigeria, a nation with one of the most vibrant digital spheres in Africa, deconstruct state power through performed popular culture on social media. As a rubric for the new digital genres of popular and visual expressions on social media, cultural netizenship indexes the digital everyday through the affordances of the participatory web. A fascinating look at the intersection of social media and popular culture performance, Cultural Netizenship reveals the logic of remediation that is central to both the internet's remix culture and the generative materialism of African popular arts.