Now in print
Views from the Shoreline: First Special Issue of Yoruba Studies Review, edited by Insa Nolte and Olukoya Ogen
Views from the Shoreline: Community, trade and religion in coastal Yorubaland and the Western Niger Delta is the first Special Issue of Yoruba Studies Review (Vol. 2.1). Co-edited by Insa Nolte (University of Birmingham, UK) and Olukoya Ogen (Adeyemi College of Education Ondo, Nigeria), it arises from an ERC Starting Researcher Grant entitled 'Knowing each other: Everyday religious encounters, social identities and tolerance in southwest Nigeria'. In addition to an introduction by the editors, Views from the Shoreline includes 19 articles by predominantly Nigerian researchers and a communiqué calling for greater political and academic engagement with the people and communities living on the coast.
Views from the Shoreline transcends dominant historical and anthropological approaches that centre on the Nigerian hinterland's capital cities and highlight the differences between ethnic and religious groups. Focusing on the high mobility and heterogeneity of communities on the Nigerian coastal stretch from the Yoruba town of Ikorodu (now a part of greater Lagos) along the Lagos lagoon and Ilaje coast up to Urhoboland and Benin, the Special Issue explores the coast as a borderland that has linked and provided refuge for different Nigerian groups as well as non-Nigerian settlers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Views from the Shoreline address the methodological difficulties produced by the coast's lack of centralization, its complex settlement histories, and its underrepresentation in government and mainstream mission archives through multi-methods approaches and in-depth fieldwork. Examining how local groups and leaders have mobilized Islam, traditional practice, and Christianity to assert both communal difference and coexistence, Views from the Shoreline illuminates that along the shoreline, ethnic and religious belonging is both mutually implicated and continually re-cast.
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