Suchergebnisse

Between 1979 and 1983 soldiers, workers, and students in Ghana launched a revolution to destroy the neo-imperial order. In the Ghanaian historical imagination that era is not remembered for its radical populism but as a time of violent chaos before the nation-state followed the road to purported neoliberal stability. The sudden rise and fall of revolutionary Ghana reveals both the possibility of alternative modes of political power in Africa and how these forms have been contained through both violence and the control of representational practices. In the contemporary moment, it is hard to theorize alternate ideas of freedom and political difference. If we start a study of twentieth-century revolution with a coup d'état in 1979 Accra, Ghana—rather than student upheavals in 1968 Paris, for example—it reorients our understanding of power by showing how young radicals sought an African-grounded sovereignty, an alternate future now forgotten.

Hiplife music in Accra, Ghana combines hip hop sampling, scratching, and rap lyricism with older forms of highlife popular music, traditional storytelling, and formal proverbial oratory. Hiplife and its mass mediated circulation provides a decentralized set of signs, practices, and performances through which Ghanaian publics reconfigure their relationship to dispersed modes of production, consumption and speaking characteristic of Ghana's privatizing state. Symbols of bodily morality are the parallel poetic terrain upon which individual choice is imagined. Signs of bodily fluids and fluidity mark a moral geography of private desires and public indiscretions. The moral legitimacy of a microphone-wielding speaker is produced and contested in lyrics and critiques of politicians, pastors and the mundane struggles of daily life. Youth are produced as self-sovereign subjects who aspire to success through the structures of entrepreneurship. Hiplife reconfigures Pan-African liberation as an entrepreneurial project epitomized by the rap artist;

Saidou Mohamed N'Daou teaches history at Chicago State University.Jesse Weaver Shipley is an assistant professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at Bard College. His recent research and publications are on popular culture, media, national politics, and race in West Africa.