Tag Archives: Ghana Studies

Call For Papers Ghana Studies – Special Issue Ghana’s Long 1970s: Reconsidering the Lost Decade (1966–1981)

There has been a surge of scholarly interest in the Ghana of the 1950s and 1960s, under its charismatic independence era leader Kwame Nkrumah. These works tell a new story of that era, focusing on the possibilities of independence by looking anew at Pan-Africanism, socialism, new histories of the Cold War and Black internationalism (Alhman 2017; Getachew 2019; Iandolo 2022; Osei-Opare 2023).

In contrast, Ghana’s 1970s are often reduced to an afterthought. Military coups dominate the narrative. Indeed, the 1970s are a decade characterized by military rule, economic decline, emigration, and hardship (Hutchful 1979; Pellow & Chazan 1986). This hardship is reflected in the relative lack of scholarship on the period. The body of work that does exist tends to reinforce a top-down narrative, with a strong focus on the state. It is only after 1981, when J.J. Rawlings comes to power and stays, that Ghana again attracts significant scholarly interest (Herbst 1993; Nugent 1995; Brydon & Legge 1996).

Forty years on, it is high time to return to the 1970s. Inspired by the interest in the Nkrumah years, and motivated by the availability of new archives in Ghana and elsewhere, we invite historians to reconsider the 1970s with us. Building on recent scholarship that begins to probe the 1970s anew (Hart 2016; Murillo 2017; Wiemers 2021), we seek contributions that engage with the following questions:
● How might our understanding of this decade change if instead of focusing on disjuncture, we looked for continuity?
● How did this period of transition between two defining political regimes (between Nkrumah and Rawlings) shape contemporary Ghana?
● How did ordinary Ghanaians navigate this tumultuous decade? What does a focus on everyday lives, rather than a state-centric approach, reveal about these years?
● What new methods and sources might we turn to, to recover histories of a decade when state institutions supposedly collapsed?
● To what extent can the framing of “Ghana’s long 1970s” (1966–1981) help us reconsider the history of postcolonial Ghana?

We are particularly interested in contributions that de-center political narratives, but are open to a wide array of approaches. We welcome expressions of interest and further conversations regarding potential submissions (write to: claire.nicolas@unil.ch).

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts (200 words) should be submitted to Claire Nicolas (claire.nicolas@unil.ch) and Elisa Prosperetti (elisa.prosperetti@nie.edu.sg) by 1 April 2023.

Contributors will be notified by 15 April 2023.

Full papers (8000 words) are to be received by 15 September 2023.

All articles will undergo peer review. Those accepted for publication will appear in a special issue of Ghana Studies, scheduled for publication in 2024.

About Ghana Studies
Ghana Studies is the peer-reviewed journal of the Ghana Studies Association, an international affiliate of the African Studies Association (U.S). Its current editors are Victoria Ellen Smith (University of Bristol) and Nana Yaw Boampong Sapong (University of Ghana). Since its first issue in 1998, the journal has published significant work by leading scholars based in Ghana, the United States, Canada, and Europe. It is published annually by the University of Wisconsin Press.

About the editors of the special issue
Claire Nicolas is a Research Fellow from the Swiss National Science Foundation, at SOAS (University of London). She specializes in the history of sport, citizenship, and gender.
Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She specializes in the history of education, development, and nation-building.

Bibliography
J. Alhman, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017).
L. Brydon and K. Legge, Adjusting Society: The World Bank, the IMF, and Ghana (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1996).
A. Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
J. Hart, “‘NIFA NIFA’: Technopolitics, Mobile Workers, and the Ambivalence of Decline in Acheampong’s Ghana,” African Economic History, 44 (2016): 181–201.
J. Herbst, The Politics of Reform in Ghana, 1982-1991 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
E. Hutchful, “A Tale of Two Regimes: Imperialism, the Military and Class in Ghana,” Review of African Political Economy 14 (1979): 36–55.
A. Iandolo, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).
B. Murillo, Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017).
P. Nugent, Big Men, Small Boys, and Politics in Ghana: Power, Ideology, and the Burden of History, 1982-1994 (London: Pinter, 1995).
N. Osei-Opare, “Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2023): 1-23.
D. Pellow and N. Chazan, Ghana: Coping with Uncertainty (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986).
A. Wiemers, Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021).

Ghana Studies Welcomes New Editors

Ghana Studies journal is proud to welcome two new editors, Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai and Jeffrey Ahlman. Abdulai and Ahlman take over for outgoing editors Carina Ray and Kofi Baku. The UW Press would like to thank Ray and Baku for all their hard work on behalf of the journal over the course of their three-year term. The following is a brief introduction to the new editors.

Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge (UK), and a PhD in Development Policy and Management from the University of Manchester, UK. He is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Public Administration at the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS), and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. His research centers on the intersection between politics and development, with particular focus on public sector reforms, natural resource governance, spatial inequalities, social policy and social protection, and democratization. He is the co-author of Governing Extractive Industries: Politics, Histories, Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2018). His published work has also appeared in African Affairs, Politics & Policy, New Political Economy, Democratization, Development Policy Review, European Journal of Development Research, Journal of International Development, and Labour, Capital & Society. He won the prestigious Gerti Hesseling Prize (2017), awarded for the best journal article by an African scholar, and was also recipient of a runner-up position for African Affairs’ African Author Prize for best paper published in 2016/2017. In his new role as co-editor of Ghana Studies, he looks forward to deepening the visibility and multidisciplinary outlook of the Journal.

Jeffrey Ahlman is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the African Studies Program at Smith College, where he specializes in African political, social, and intellectual history. His research reflects on issues of decolonization, political and social sovereignty, citizenship, and the Cold War in mid-twentieth-century Africa. His book, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana, was published by Ohio University Press in 2017. He is currently completing two books. The first is a biography of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, which is under contract with Ohio University Press. The second—under contract with I.B. Tauris—is a history of Ghana since approximately the mid-nineteenth century. His other published work has appeared in the Journal of African History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Africa Today, Ghana Studies, and Kronos: Southern African Histories. He looks forward to his new role as co-editor of Ghana Studies, where he strives to further promote the journal as the premier site for the interdisciplinary study of Ghana.

Call for Papers

The editors welcome submissions of original research about Ghana for potential publication in Ghana Studies. Submissions from all disciplines will be considered. Manuscripts of interest could explore, but are not limited to, topics such as:

Ghana’s 2020 elections
Ghana’s recent financial crisis
The political economy of oil in Ghana
Questions of inequality
Challenges of structural transformation
Ghanaian-Diasporic Relations

For full guidelines, please visit http://bit.ly/gssubmissions.

Most Read Articles of 2019

As 2019 wraps up, we take a look back at the most read journal articles published this year. The following list presents the most popular article from each of our journals. Many are freely available to read until the end of January.

African Economic History: “The Politics of African Freehold Land Ownership in Early Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890–1930” by Joseph Mujere and Admire Mseba

Arctic Anthropology: “Farming in the Extreme—Animal Management in Late Medieval and Early Modern Northern Finland” by Maria Lahtinen and Anna-Kaisa Salmi

Contemporary Literature: “Don DeLillo, Madison Avenue, and the Aesthetics of Postwar Fiction” by Aaron Derosa

Ecological Restoration: “Five Decades of Wetland Soil Development of a Constructed Tidal Salt Marsh, North Carolina, USA” by Aaron Noll, Courtney Mobilian, and Christopher Craft

Ghana Studies: “Descendant Epistemology” by Ebony Coletu

Journal of Human Resources: “Teacher Effects on Complex Cognitive Skills and Social-Emotional Competencies” by Matthew A. Kraft

Land Economics: “Adaptation, Sea Level Rise, and Property Prices in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed” by Patrick Walsh, Charles Griffiths, Dennis Guignet, and Heather Klemick

Landscape Journal: “Core Knowledge Domains of Landscape Architecture” by William N. Langley, Robert C. Corry, and Robert D. Brown

Luso-Brazilian Review: “Os lugares do morto: O que faz Eça na literatura portuguesa contemporânea?” by Pedro Marques

Monatshefte: “Recent German Ecocriticism in Interdisciplinary Context” by Helga G. Braunbeck

Native Plants Journal: “Successfully Storing Milkweed Taproots for Habitat Restoration” by Melissa L. Topping, R. Kasten Dumroese, and Jeremiah R. Pinto

African Studies Association 2019

This week, the UW Press has been exhibiting at the annual African Studies Association Conference in Boston. The conference is wrapping up, but if you’re attending, there’s still one last day to stop by booth 314 for discounts on books and journals. And if you’re not in Boston, here’s a look at our new and notable titles in African Studies.

Holding the World Together, edited by Nwando Achebe and Claire Robertson

Featuring contributions from some of the most accomplished scholars on the topic, Holding the World Together explores the rich and varied ways women have wielded power across the African continent, from the precolonial period to the present. This comprehensive volume, focusing on agency and avoiding stereotypical depictions, features essays on the representation of African women, their role in national liberation movements, their incorporation into the world economy, changing family and marriage systems, economic impacts on their lives and livelihoods, their unique challenges in the areas of health and disease, and their experiences with religious fundamentalism, violence, and slavery.

Health in a Fragile State, by John M. Janzen

Based on extensive field research in the Manianga region of the Lower Congo, Health in a Fragile State is an anthropological account of public health and health care in the 1980s and 1990s after the collapse of the Congolese state. This work brings into focus John M. Janzen’s earlier books on African health and healing, revealing the collaborative effort by local, national, and international agencies to create viable alternative institutions to those that represented the centralized state. With this volume, Janzen documents and analyzes the realignment of existing institutions and the creation of new ones that shape health and healing.

Throughout, Janzen explores the manner in which power and information, including science, are legitimized in the preservation and improvement of health. Institutional validity and knowledge empower citizens and health practitioners to gain the upper hand over the region’s principal diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid, and HIV/AIDS.

African Economic History, edited by Mariana Candido, Toyin Falola, Toby Green, and Paul E. Lovejoy

African Economic History publishes scholarly essays in English and French on the economic history of African societies from precolonial times to the present. It features research in a variety of fields and time periods, including studies on labor, slavery, trade and commercial networks, economic transformations, colonialism, migration, development policies, social and economic inequalities, and poverty. The audience includes historians, economists, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, policymakers, and a range of other scholars interested in African economies—past and present.

Spirit Children, by Aaron R. Denham

Some babies and toddlers in parts of West Africa are considered spirit children—nonhumans sent from the forest to cause misfortune and destroy the family. These are usually deformed or ailing infants, or children whose births coincide with tragic events or who display unusual abilities. Aaron R. Denham offers a nuanced ethnographic study of this phenomenon in Northern Ghana that examines both the motivations of the families and the structural factors that lead to infanticide. He also turns the lens on the prevailing misunderstandings about this controversial practice. Denham offers vivid accounts of families’ life-and-death decisions that engage the complexity of the context, local meanings, and moral worlds of those confronting a spirit child.

Ghana Studies, edited by Carina Ray and Kofi Baku

Ghana Studies is the journal of the Ghana Studies Association, an international affiliate of the African Studies Association. Published annually, Ghana Studies strives to provide a forum for cutting edge original research about Ghana’s society, culture, environment, and history. All of the scholarly articles in Ghana Studies are peer-reviewed by two anonymous referees, coordinated by an editorial team based in both North America and Ghana. Since its first issue in 1998, Ghana Studies has published significant work by leading scholars based in Ghana, the United States, Canada, and Europe. In addition, Ghana Studies features occasional material, source reports, and book reviews. It also serves to provide official notice of fellowships and prizes awarded by the Ghana Studies Association.

Ghana Studies Publishes Special Forum on First Ghanaian Archaeologist

The latest volume of Ghana Studies features a special forum in memory of James Kwesi Anquandah, who was a pioneer in the field of archaeology in Ghana. Forum editor Ebony Coletu chatted with the editors of Ghana Studies to describe Anquandah’s legacy and support for interdisciplinary research.

Ghana Studies Editors: For readers who may be new to Ghana Studies or to the field of archaeology, can you tell us why James Anquandah was such a towering figure in the field?

Ebony Coletu: Professor Anquandah was the first student of archaeology at the University of Ghana in the sixties—and he went on to mentor five generations of archaeology students as a faculty member, along with countless others who were not working in archaeology or even students at the university. Because his research practice was deeply interdisciplinary, he attracted scholars beyond the department, many like myself just dropping in to his office to ask a few questions, but leaving with an exciting mandate to develop new approaches. You hear this in Kwasi Ampene’s article too, how conversations with Anquandah animated a speculative approach to researching musical practices in the Akan Stone Age and Early Iron Age. So Anquandah did not prescribe a method, he inspired methods, really from his energetic curiosity and commitment to telling new stories about the distant past. Also in this forum, Mohammed Mustapha and Wazi Apoh describe his “eclectic method”—which is a multi-disciplinary research protocol Anquandah used to answer complex questions. For him, it was not enough to write from a single discipline, or apply a single method consistently. Instead he wanted to synthesize history, policy, sociology, and art, to help reformulate and deepen the significance of a question and tell a better story about research findings, particularly for publics beyond the academy.

GS Editors: What distinguishes this special forum commemorating the work and legacy of James Kwesi Anquandah (1938-2017)?

EC: Soon after he passed, I circulated a call for papers that focused on mentorship as a way to map his influence across fields, thus “reframing the reach of archaeology.” The responses affirmed the call by capturing Anquandah’s marathon commitment to mentoring (training five generations of archaeologists in Ghana) as well as the ongoing work of decolonizing disciplines. Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann addresses this directly in her essay, when she writes about autoarchaeology, a research practice that foregrounds direct descendants as researchers whose families have lived in or around the excavation site. She enlisted Danish-Ga descendants as researchers at Christiansborg Castle, unearthing artifacts and posing questions collaboratively. As a consequence of centering community-based knowledge production, the project inspires new pipelines for training in archaeology aimed at multilingual researchers who are gaining experience on site. She reframes the reach of archaeology by asking who can do this work and why? For Kwasi Ampene, Anquandah inspired a deep-time approach to Akan ethnomusicology, and in the process he challenges our dependence on sixteenth-century European traveler sketches typically used as evidence of musical practices. Questioning the explanatory power and the historical limits of these images, Ampene goes on to suggest a deep-time alternative: using archaeological research to speculate on the multipurpose use of agricultural instruments to make ancient music, inspired by those used for both purposes today.

GS Editors: You not only guest edited this special forum, you also contributed an essay to it in which you introduce the idea of “descendent epistemology.” Can you tell readers how your conversations with Anquandah helped you formulate this innovative methodology?

EC: I was fortunate to meet Anquandah in the early stages of my research on Chief Sam, an Akyem merchant who led a diasporic return movement that recruited support from thousands of African Americans to purchase a ship that set sail from Texas, arriving in the Gold Coast in 1915. I had narrow interests in that first conversation. I wanted to reconstruct a fuller version of Sam’s family tree and identify a plausible link to the Sams of Anomabo, who are part of my family. Chief Sam’s life was far from conventional, leaving traces and descendants in multiple countries, including multiple wives and stepchildren. I sought Anquandah’s help to make sense of a more complex family tree. But after reading his interview notes with descendants and talking with him over several years, he began to reflect my questions back to me, noting that my concern with kinship had widened to include the technical matter of diasporic return: what was the status of African Americans who pledged to live, work, and die in African communities? Were they also, in some sense, part of Sam’s family? Sam had proposed to adopt them en masse to facilitate the process of landownership and repair a spiritual wound from separation by slavery. While mass adoption was unsuccessful, those who remained quickly integrated into indigenous communities through other means. I found Sam’s proposal, and colonial attempts to block it, an important antecedent to contemporary debates about diasporic right of return, evidence of kinship, and different routes to Ghanaian citizenship.

GS Editors: Taken together, what does this collection of special forum essays tell us about the next generation of archaeological research coming out of Ghana?

EC: The last essay says much on this point. Mustapha and Apoh tell a story about Anquandah’s decolonial legacy, which has shaped their own research itineraries instead of resting on a citational model that preserves what previous generations of Africanist archaeologists prioritized. For example, Apoh’s research builds new sources for the understudied topic of German missionionization and colonization in historical archaeology. While Mustapha pushes back against an exogenous theory of social complexity in the Mamprugu Traditional Area in Northern Ghana by investigating indigenous innovations that led to large scale ancient ironworking. Engmann’s work also sharpens this point by challenging value assessments in the literature, which can determine which places are considered critical to research while marginalizing others. Her work at Christiansborg Castle is groundbreaking for the sheer number of artifacts excavated in a short period of time on a site previously considered marginal. This despite the fact that it served as the seat of several administrations, from Danish governors to Flight Lieutenant John Jerry Rawlings. Though this forum began in a memorial spirit, it was exciting to edit because it features forthcoming interdisciplinary work in Ghana Studies encouraged by Professor Anquandah’s pathbreaking example.

Ghana Studies Volume 22 is available on Project MUSE. Browse the table of contents, which includes the special forum along with other articles and reviews. And if you’re attending the African Studies Association Conference this week, stop by the University of Wisconsin Press booth (#314), where you’ll find Ghana Studies alongside many of our other titles in African Studies.

Journals News from 2018

The University of Wisconsin Press Journals Division Reflects on the Past Year

This year, our journals underwent several personnel changes, which will continue into 2019. Daniel W. Bromley celebrated his retirement after forty-four years of editing Land Economics, and Daniel J. Phaneuf began his tenure as editor. Ecological Restoration recently welcomed new Assistant Editor Tabby Fenn. Look for an introduction to Fenn in the next issue of ER, Vol. 37.1. After seventeen years of serving as the editor of Monatshefte, Hans Adler will begin to transition into retirement, with Hannah Eldridge and Sonja Klocke joining him as co-editors in 2019 and taking over in 2020. The official announcement will be published in Monatshefte 110.4.

In other journals news, Ghana Studies celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a special issue featuring reflections on the journal. And in the spirit of looking back, we are working to digitize the Ghana Studies archive for inclusion on Project MUSE. Land Economics implemented submission fees as a supplementary source of revenue for the journal. Finally, the Journal of Human Resources announced that, starting in Fall 2019, it will publish two additional articles per issue. We’re excited to see what the coming year holds for our journals.

Here at the Press, in a move to expand our in-house editorial services, Chloe Lauer was promoted to Editorial and Advertising Manager. Chloe serves as a production editor for African Economic History and Ghana Studies, and she provides editorial support for several other publications—on top of coordinating advertising sales for all of our journals.

In April, the Press welcomed Claire Eder as Journals Marketing Specialist. Claire has been focused on author and community outreach for our journals, representing the Press at the Charleston Library Conference and bringing two journals (Land Economics and Contemporary Literature) into the world of social media. In coordination with our journals’ editorial teams, she created a resource for authors with advice for publicizing their articles.

In 2019, the Journals Division will work on several initiatives, such as sending out a Request for Bids for online hosting providers and reviewing our editorial standards. This review involves formalizing a statement of publication ethics and increasing transparency with regards to peer review procedures. John Ferguson, our Production Manager, is in the process of rethinking our metadata standards in order to make articles more discoverable. Additionally, we aim to work more closely with journal editorial offices in the coming year, increasing our reporting frequency from annually to quarterly for those journals published four times a year, as well as organizing an annual get-together where staff from our editorial offices in the Wisconsin area can meet to discuss issues in scholarly publishing. It is shaping up to be another busy year, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. We are grateful to our publication partners, who provide us with the drive to innovate and improve.

Previous Journal Editors Reflect on Their Tenure at GHANA STUDIES

Ghana Studies Journal Publishes 20^th Anniversary Special Issue

With the most recent volume of Ghana Studies, the journal celebrates its twentieth anniversary, as well as the thirtieth anniversary of the Ghana Studies Association, of which it is the official publication. Along with the usual articles and book reviews, the current issue features an anniversary forum, where scholars reflect on the history of the field of Ghana Studies as well as the progress of the journal and the association.

One of the forum’s notable offerings is a conversation with previous Ghana Studies editors Akosua Adomako Ampofo and Stephan F. Miescher, in which they discuss their editorial challenges and successes, as well as their thoughts on the journal’s potential future directions. Below is an excerpt from this conversation, centering on the ways in which Adomako Ampofo and Miescher cultivated a focus on Gender Studies in the publication’s pages. The full interview can be found in Ghana Studies Volume 21.

GS Editors: You are both noted Gender Studies scholars, who also brought your respective backgrounds in history and sociology to your term as editors of GS. Has your mark on the journal been shaped by your (inter)disciplinary orientations? Or by other commitments?

Akosua: I like to see myself more as an interdisciplinary scholar rather than as a sociologist. This is why I am attracted more to the works of sociologists like W. E. B. DuBois and Patricia Hill Collins—both authors who speak to questions of gender and race, as well as their intersections, which is where much of my own work is situated—than, say, to the works of Marx and Weber, albeit the latter certainly have their value. There are two ways I tend to respond to an article: If it’s in my field, I am looking for something new and refreshing, or new insights to a question that has puzzled scholars. So to that extent I tend to be more critical, but also, when it comes to a younger scholar, I’m more excited about pushing it to publication. However, if the work comes from an area outside my own area of expertise, then I am looking to be thrilled, sometimes to have my socks knocked off so I have that aha! moment, which I want the whole world to feel. Then I can proudly shout that it came out in a journal I am affiliated with. And then, yes, definitely I think that having spent my entire academic career in a multi- and interdisciplinary institute, I am very sympathetic to interdisciplinary work. And of course gender scholarship is so interdisciplinary. After almost thirty years of teaching, I have found that students respond much more enthusiastically, and tend to engage more with the class, when we have a multidisciplinary set of texts. In the gender classes I coteach at IAS, we have always included literary texts and films, as well as work in history, political science, economics, and so forth. It’s my view that especially for African Studies, this multidisciplinary approach is important since the nuances of our global history and contemporary realities often get lost in the cross-sectional or the single-approach analysis.

Stephan: My own research interests certainly had an impact on the type of work we pursued and published. Questions about gender have been important to me for a long time. As GS editor, I was pleased that issue 14 featured several pieces on gender including Ernestina Dankyi’s article on transnational families, Peace Tetteh on child domestic labor, and Josephine Beoku-Betts on women academics in neoliberal Ghana. In the same issue, we published two articles on same-sex intimacies, a topic then still marginalized in African Studies and in Ghana. The piece by Serena Owusua Dankwa deals with same-sex love and female masculinity; the one by William Banks explores the subjectivities among saso people, a community of men who engage in same-sex erotic practices. The special issue on health and health care (issue 15–16) also includes works with a gender analysis, such as Fidelia Ohemeng’s article on the gender dimension of trust and caregiving for HIV patients and Jo Ellen Fair’s piece on love and newspapers advice columns. My tenure as GS editor corresponded with a period when my scholarly interests expanded to the history of development and technology. For over a decade, I have been researching the history of the Akosombo Dam for my forthcoming book, A Dam for Africa: The Volta River Project and Modernization in Postcolonial Ghana. This interest also led to the “Revisiting Modernization Conference,” for which I wrote with Dzodzi Tsikata a paper that compared discourses and practices of modernization in relation to the Akosombo and Bui Dams. Our paper appeared in GS 12–13.

Akosua: I certainly had my favorites among the papers on gender; however, I’m not telling. What I will say is, all the gender issues that were addressed in the volumes mentioned by Stephan, which we coedited, brought fresh and important issues to the table.