Description
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.
Table of Contents
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.
