Everyday Transnationalism and the Postcolony in West Africa

Abstract

West Africa is a paradoxical region when it comes to the tension between the nation state and the transnational. It stems from fundamental continuity of state power inherited from colonizers in postcolonial situations. The discursive grid of the postcolonial is more robust than most observers would expect to find in a region like West Africa. Everyday, as opposed to formal-institutional, transnationalsim turns out to be a more important. In West Africa, transnationalism is a tactical matter with regard to everyday life, There are not so much efforts to alter the discursive grid of the postcolony, but to begin to erct an alternative discursive grid, such as a joking kinship. Joking kinship ignores the discursive grid of the postcolony, and lays down in identity and imagination the basis for an entirely different, more transnational framework for political belonging.