Beyond simplistic binaries of "the dark continent" or "Africa Rising," Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the ...privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. This ethnographic study examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.
Seizing Power Singh, Naunihal
2014, 2014-07-01
eBook
While coups drive a majority of regime changes and are responsible for the overthrow of many democratic governments, there has been very little empirical work on the subject. Seizing Power develops a ...new theory of coup dynamics and outcomes, drawing upon 300 hours of interviews with coup participants and an original dataset of 471 coup attempts worldwide from 1950 to 2000. Naunihal Singh delivers a concise and empirical evaluation, arguing that understanding the dynamics of military factions is essential to predicting the success or failure of coups.
Singh draws on an aspect of game theory known as a coordination game to explain coup dynamics. He finds a strong correlation between successful coups and the ability of military actors to project control and the inevitability of success. Using Ghana’s multiple coups as well as the 1991 coup attempt in the USSR, Singh shows how military actors project an image of impending victory that is often more powerful than the reality on the ground.
Singh tests his coordination theory by analyzing ten coups in Ghana from 1967 to 1981. In the process he identifies three distinct points of origination: coups from top military offices, coups from the middle ranks, and mutinous coups from low-level soldiers.
Singh’s theory will provide scholars with insight into the dynamics of authoritarian regimes, democratic transitions, and political instability. Seizing Power will appeal to scholars and students of civil-military relations, democracy transition studies, and the politics of Africa.
How do Ghanaian Pentecostals resolve the contradictions of their own faith while remaining faithful to their religious identity? Bringing together the anthropology of Christianity and the ...anthropology of ethics, Girish Daswani'sLooking Back, Moving Forwardinvestigates the compromises with the past that members of Ghana's Church of Pentecost make in order to remain committed Christians.
Even as church members embrace the break with the past that comes from being "born-again," many are less concerned with the boundaries of Christian practice than with interpersonal questions - the continuity of suffering after conversion, the causes of unhealthy relationships, the changes brought about by migration - and how to deal with them. By paying ethnographic attention to the embodied practices, interpersonal relationships, and moments of self-reflection in the lives of members of the Church of Pentecost in Ghana and amongst the Ghanaian diaspora in London,Looking Back, Moving Forwardexplores ethical practice as it emerges out of the questions that church members and other Ghanaian Pentecostals ask themselves.
This book discusses the role of cultural practices and policy for sustainable development in West Africa across different artistic disciplines, including performance, video, theatre, community arts ...and cultural heritage. Based on ethnographic field research in local communities, the book presents findings on current debates of cultural sustainability in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Benin. It provides a unique perspective connecting cultural studies, conflict studies and practical peacebuilding approaches through the arts. The first part pays particular attention to aspects of social cohesion and the circumstances of internally displaced persons e. g. caused by the Boko Haram insurgency in Northeast Nigeria. The second part focuses on cultural policy issues and challenges in the context of sustainable development, investigating participatory approaches and bottom-up processes, the role of governments and civil society, as well as performing arts organizations and universities in policy making and implementation processes. Performing Sustainability in West Africa presents research results and new methods on the role of artistic and cultural practices in conflict situations as well as current debates in cultural policy for researchers, academics, NGOs and students in cultural studies, sustainable development studies and African studies.
In Sharing the Burden of Sickness , Jonathan Roberts
examines the history of the healing cultures in Accra, Ghana. When
people are sick in Accra, they can pursue a variety of therapeutic
options. ...West African traditional healers, spiritual healers from
the Islamic and Christian traditions, Western clinical medicine,
and an open marketplace of over-the-counter medicine provide ample
means to promote healing and preventing sickness. Each of these
healing cultures had a historical point of arrival in the city of
Accra, and Roberts tells the story of how they intertwined and how
patients and healers worked together in their struggle against
disease.
By focusing on the medical history of one place, Roberts details
how urban development, colonization, decolonization, and
independence brought new populations to the city, where they shared
their ideas about sickness and health.
Sharing the Burden of Sickness explores medical history
during important periods in Accra's history. Roberts not only
introduces readers to a wide range of ideas about health but also
charts a course for a thoroughly pluralistic culture of healing in
the future, especially with the spread of new epidemics of HIV/AIDS
and ebola.
Village Work Wiemers, Alice
2021, 2021-05-28
eBook
A robust historical case study that demonstrates how village development became central to the rhetoric and practice of statecraft in rural Ghana.
Combining oral histories with decades of archival ...material, Village Work formulates a sweeping history of twentieth-century statecraft that centers on the daily work of rural people, local officials, and family networks, rather than on the national governments and large-scale plans that often dominate development stories. Wiemers shows that developmentalism was not simply created by governments and imposed on the governed; instead, it was jointly constructed through interactions between them.
The book contributes to the historiographies of development and statecraft in Africa and the Global South by
emphasizing the piecemeal, contingent, and largely improvised ways both development and the state are comprised and experienced
providing new entry points into longstanding discussions about developmental power and discourse
unsettling common ideas about how and by whom states are made
exposing the importance of unpaid labor in mediating relationships between governments and the governed
showing how state engagement could both exacerbate and disrupt inequities
Despite massive changes in twentieth-century political structures—the imposition and destruction of colonial rule, nationalist plans for pan-African solidarity and modernization, multiple military coups, and the rise of neoliberal austerity policies—unremunerated labor and demonstrations of local leadership have remained central tools by which rural Ghanaians have interacted with the state. Grounding its analysis of statecraft in decades of daily negotiations over budgets and bureaucracy, the book tells the stories of developers who decided how and where projects would be sited, of constituents who performed labor, and of a chief and his large cadre of educated children who met and shaped demands for local leaders. For a variety of actors, invoking “the village” became a convenient way to allocate or attract limited resources, to highlight or downplay struggles over power, and to forge national and international networks.
In nineteenth-century Ghana, regional warfare rooted in profound social and economic transformations led thousands of displaced people to seek refuge in the small mountain kingdom of Akuapem. There ...they encountered missionaries from Germany whose message of sin and forgiveness struck many of these newcomers as irrelevant to their needs. However, together with Akuapem’s natives, these newcomers began reformulating Christianity as a ritual tool for social and physical healing, as well as power, in a dangerous spiritual and human world. The result was Ghana’s oldest African-initiated variant of Christianity: a homegrown expression of unbroken moral, political, and religious priorities. Focusing on the southeastern Gold Coast in the middle of the nineteenth century, Healing and Power in Ghana identifies patterns of indigenous reception, rejection, and reformulation of what had initially arrived, centuries earlier, as a European trade religion. Paul Grant draws on a mixture of European and indigenous sources in several languages, building on recent scholarship in world Christianity to address the question of conversion through the lens of the indigenous moral imagination. This approach considers, among other things, the conditions in which Akuapem locals and newly arrived displaced persons might find Christianity useful or applicable to their needs. This is no traditional history of the European-African religious encounter. Ghanaian Christians identified the missionaries according to preexisting political and religious categories—as a new class of shrine priests. They resolved their own social crises in ways the missionaries were unable to understand. In effect, Christianity became an indigenous religion years before indigenous people converted in any appreciable numbers. By foregrounding the sacrificial idiom shared by locals, missionaries, and native thinkers, Healing and Power in Ghana presents a new model of scholarship for both West African history and world Christianity.
Despite Ghana's strong democratic track record in recent decades, the economy remains underdeveloped. Industrial policies are necessary to transform the colonial trading economy that Ghana inherited ...at independence, but successive governments have been unwilling or unable to implement them. In this highly original interpretation, supported by new empirical material, Lindsay Whitfield exposes the reasons for why the Ghanaian economy remains underdeveloped and sets her theory in the wider African context. She offers a new way of thinking about the political economy of Africa that charts a clear path away from defining Africa in terms of neopatrimonial politics and that provides new conceptual tools for addressing what kind of business-state relations are necessary to drive economic development. As a study of Ghana that addresses both the economy and politics from early colonialism to the present day, this is a must-read for any student or scholar interested in the political economy of development in Africa.
This volume consists of multiple original comprehensive scholarship about and approaches to the history of the fortresses of Ghana and Benin. It suggests an alternative approach and view on them.
