Nation as Grand Narrative

Most tales of African political history center on the formation of institutions, governments, and their interests.While this will always be an important perspective, the ways in which people have experienced political changes as reflected in the daily, weekly, and monthly news media are just as important.In fact, it may be more important to focus on narratives when discussing the formation of a new nation in the African context given the deep ethnic, religious, social, and political divides that must necessarily be overcome.Nation as Grand Narrative addresses this gap in the literature by its analysis of the press.In this book, Wale Adebanwi tells the story of Nigeria's birth and growth into the identity it has today.It is an impressive effort in granular-level detailed research and a great example of media analysis.By scouring some of the major newspapers that have served the Nigerian people since the 1950s, Adebanwi gives readers a close look at the priorities of the press and how those have shaped the Nigerian identity.Focusing mostly on postcolonial Nigeria but drawing from historical events going back as far as the 1914 amalgamation of the northern and southern protectorates, the book details the political developments that have held the attention of Nigerians.Adebanwi posits that "newspaper narratives [. ..] reflect, construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the struggle as well as the diversities, opportunities, and possibilities of single or multiple nationhoods in Nigeria" (p. 6).In the rest of the book, he delivers on showing just how this looks in the Nigerian case.In Part 1, Contextual and Conceptual Perspectives, Adebanwi argues for the validity of his approach to the subject of national identity formation.He shows the potential for the press to directly and indirectly shape people's understanding of social structures, political figures, and economic conditions, and by so doing, influence the formation of nations within Nigeria as well as Nigeria itself.Readers will particularly benefit from the theoretical approach Adebanwi employs.His conceptualizations of key ideas such as a nation, an ethnic group or a tribe stand on strong foundations in sociology and political science, and a good grasp on them is essential in order to understand the rest of the book.The unit of the ethnic group is particularly central in Nigeria, and Adebanwi does not fail to acknowledge and thoroughly explain this.Based on the focus on the ethnic group in the book, any reader without a pre-existing knowledge of societal structures in Nigeria must

Art · Epistemology · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies