Pop culture may be easy to consume, but it is notoriously hard to define. Grace A. Musila’s ambitious and authoritative edited collection titled The Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture has decided to meet this challenge head on by bringing together the work of 27 international scholars representing multiple disciplinary perspectives to deepen our understanding of popular culture on the African continent.

The premise is simple: “popular cultural formations convene valuable platforms for working through questions of everyday life, while mapping futures, desires and aspirations.” Musila acknowledges that while scholars have been interested in African popular culture for several decades, this handbook does not attempt to “secure the parameters” of an academic field but rather, it is fueled by a curiosity about what these African popular imaginaries may enable and what they may allow us to learn about African social and political life. In a rich opening chapter that riffs on the popular Kenyan children’s game, cha’mawe, Musila offers a framework for reading African popular cultural imaginaries through 13 interweaving theoretical strands, from individual questions of self-making and entrepreneurship to larger-scale perspectives on politics and networks.

The 23 articles range from the hyperlocal to the global in scope, from comic arts in Nigerian Pidgin English to globally circulating TED talks, football fandom in Eldoret, Kenya to queer internet counterpublics in Mauritania.

In its impressive geographic breadth and dazzling variety of genres, methods and mediums, the volume offers a complex and expansive view of contemporary African culture-making. It will be useful to instructors and scholars across the disciplinary spectrum in African Studies and connoisseurs of popular culture anywhere in the world looking to expand their repertoire and theoretical vocabulary. In this interview, Musila speaks about the book’s key interventions, the role of anthologies for African studies, broadly, and offers a list of works that should be read alongside this collection.