The Intestines of the State

“In this enthralling history of youth in the Cameroon Grassfields, Argenti shows how centuries of inequity have made young people the brunt of unspeakable exploitation and violence. Such abiding trauma finds little voice in modern, monolithic narratives of state. But youth are still marginal in the postcolonial present, embodying most acutely the ghosts of catastrophes past. And it is they who have taken charge of the means of counter-memory, the performances of dance and masquerade most capable of engaging the dark 'history of the unsaid.' Argenti’s account offers stunning insight into pasts too horrific to be fixed in discourse, pasts ever ready to take unsettling hold of the here and now.”

“Argenti succeeds in doing justice to the uncanny tension evoked by the masquerades of Oku and their haunting performances by the chiefdom’s youth. He vividly shows how the masks’ unsettling combination of discipline and subversion expresses horrors from the past that remain unspeakable: the abduction and sale of young men and women by their eldersduring the long centuries of the slave trade, followed by similar practices in (post)colonial times. In his seminal treatment, the dances of the village youth effectively question the linear history the palace tries to impose. This book offers challenging contributions to the study of dance, the indeterminacy of memory, and the actuality of the slave trade in Africa.”