Federico Donelli, Turkey in Africa: Turkey’s strategic involvement in sub-Saharan Africa. London: I. B. Tauris (hb £85 – 978 0 7556 3697 6; pb £28.99 – 978 0 7556 3701 0). 2021/2022, 224 pp.

autonomous vis-à-vis mediated elite discourses (such as politicians’ stigmatization of ‘homosexuals’ in their speeches). Yet the clunky, encompassing notion of public opinion leads Newell to tack constantly between generalizing statements and an acknowledgement that it is impossible to write of a singular, let alone unified, perspective on dirt in Lagos. The shifting focus of the book’s three parts can be challenging for the reader. It makes it difficult to pin down a set of overarching arguments, although the short conclusion is effective in this regard. The attempt to speak to three big concepts – dirt, media, urban life – inevitably means that the space to address each, and their interrelations, is limited. For example, there is little explicit sense of how the book contributes to longstanding anthropological work on dirt; likewise, it does not respond to burgeoning scholarship on the urban–media nexus. Still, the book is exemplary for the fluidity of its narrative arc, for its methodological reflexivity, for its detailed attention to vernacular language, and for its richly textured, polyphonic portrait of Lagos as a (post)colonial metropolis. By eschewing a central, driving line of argument, the book reveals the creative potentials opened up by interdisciplinary study and makes a distinctive contribution to the renewal of African urban and media studies.