Combining sophisticated theoretical critiques, masterly historiographical surveys, and rich empirical analyses, the various chapters poignantly capture the meanings, styles and symbols of leisure, as it is molded and marked by the spatial, temporal, and social particularities of place, time and society, of geography, history, and social structure, including the inscriptions of class, status, gender, and other social markers. Leisure is both about the ordinariness and extraordinariness of daily life, poetry and prose to the pleasures and pressures, pain and pathos, promises and possibilities of effective and affective living.

Covering leisure activities from football to music and dance, to making and watching films, videos and television in cities from Cairo to Cape Town, Dakar to Nairobi, and the traffic of cosmopolitan and transnational leisure from abroad, including from the African diaspora, the book opens a new chapter in African social and cultural studies

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