This course explores the relationship between popular culture and politics in the context of globalization in West African societies. It focuses on how popular sport, music, dance, film and other forms of popular culture and recreation inform and shape political action and participation. Long a meeting point of global and local currents, West Africa allows for examining how the creative mixing of local and foreign ideas and practices facilitates nationalism and democratic citizenship, enables hitherto marginal political players such as youth, and offers the possibility of transformation in the social politics of gender and generational relations.