Naija, the missing spectacle: guidebooks on Nigeria in the neoliberal era

ABSTRACT

Nigeria, long a quintessential terrain for the expatriate gaze more than the tourist gaze, has now very nearly disappeared as a topic from standard Western issued guidebooks. The gap in publications was very noticeable by the second decade of the 21^st century, but it came as a culmination of the country’s diminishing role in those for the last four neoliberal decades. The country has apparently lost its identifiable role as spectacle in global capitalism in the Debordian sense. At the same time, space opened up for radical Western guidebooks and in the last decade, radical homegrown guides that reflect and celebrate the African gaze on Africa, with a new and unashamedly local frame of reference and context. Not surprisingly, this overlaps meaningfully with socialist and feminist political commitment in most relevant literature. This article deals with the projected image of Nigeria in guidebooks foreign, as well as domestic.

KEYWORDS:

• West Africa guidebooks
• Nigeria guidebooks
• expatriate gaze
• radical guidebooks
• regaining the gaze
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Nicholas D Parsons (himself an author of Vienna’s Blue Guide and an aficionado of Central Europe) mourns the end to Baedeker’s hegemony, meaning that the glory days of ‘the erudite, authoritative vade mecum of the now dissipated class of the Bildungsbuergertum’ were over (this quote alone shows Parsons’ Biedermeier sensibilities and his rather paleo-conservative ideology). (Parsons, 2007: 215).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Mayer

Adam Mayer is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Szechenyi Istvan University Gyor, Hungary. A researcher of African radicalism and African political theory, he is the author of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (Pluto Press, 2016).