Academic literature on the topic 'Ghanaian Popular Arts'

AbstractWest African popular theatre has been the subject of a growing body of scholarship. Yet what has not yet been adquately accounted for in this literature is historical change, both within particular theatre traditions and in their relation to society at large. This article begins to address the gap by focusing on the Ghanaian concert party in the volatile years from the end of World War II through the early years of independence. During this period the Ghanaian concert party underwent profound transformations in form, content, and its modes of production and consumption. Through their geographic mobility and widespread popularity, concert parties participated first-hand in the transformation of public consciousness. Just as the popular press played a central role in the formation of European nationalism, so popular travelling theatre performed a pivotal role among a largely non-literate population during Ghana's transition from colonialism to modern nation state. This article interprets the generic conventions through which the concert party convened and constituted its new public. By deploying an eclectic range of formal techniques to dramatise everyday realities, concert parties became a primary integrative mechanism through which audiences negotiated a tumultuous historical epoch.

In Ghana, as well as in other parts of Africa, pentecostal Churches have recently become extremely popular. Within these Churches reference is made frequently to the devil, who is associated with the non-Christian gods and ghosts as well as Western luxury goods. Present Ghanaian popular culture reveals a striking obsession with images of the devil and of evil. By analysing stories told and published in Ghanaian ‘born again’ circles about money received through a contract with the devil or one of his agents, the author attempts to understand (1) what evil is denounced in these movements by means of the devil, and (2) how, with the help of the notion of the devil, ‘born again’ Christians think about poverty and wealth. It is argued that collective fantasies around the devil have to be understood against the background of difficult socio-economic conditions. These stories entail both a critique of the capitalist economy in the name of the pre-capitalist ideal of mutual family assistance (although a much more limited critique than Taussig suggested in his The Devil and Commodity Fetishism) and an opportunity to fantasise about things people cannot afford but nevertheless desire.

AbstractReading is a situated ‘social event’, taking place in the context of collective ‘assumptions about language and meaning’ which condition an individual's interpretations. Before turning the first page of a popular novel, or watching the first scene of a theatrical performance, the ‘reader’ already occupies a culturally specific receptive position, and each instance of interpretation is likely to be informed by shared preconceptions about the function of literature.The role of readers is essential to the discussion of popular narratives in West Africa. Authors acknowledge the readership's participation in the co-creation of novels, to such an extent that plots themselves may be transformed or extended in response to letters from readers. By taking sides with the character type whose social position most closely resembles their own, readers select specific figures through whom they can apportion praise and blame, through whom they can confirm their own opinions about men's and women's domestic roles. Readers adopt interpretive positions that depend upon the relevance of fictional types to their storehouse of opinions about marriage partners, ‘good-time girls’, mothers-in-law, ‘sugar-daddies’ and prostitutes.A reader-centred perspective, then, is vital to complement the ‘straight’ literary analysis of popular narratives. Indeed, one could say that, without the interpretive input of readers, West African popular fiction is nothing. Readers cannot be homogenised into a single species: during the reception process, distinct, preconstituted reading communities rise up, identifying ‘themselves’ in the narrative as gendered social subjects and extrapolating opinions from the text. In this receptive environment, popular narratives take on the semblance of rafts rather than shipwrecks, conveying and buoying up readers' active, self-interested reconstructions of themselves.

How do popular media genres reinforce or provide alternative perspectives to circulating official political discourses, as well as articulate issues of social concern? In what ways do such media offer insights into aspects of cultural practices that inform and represent matters of key significance in people's quotidian lives? This dissertation investigates these two general questions within four distinct Ghanaian popular visual media genres: popular video-films, political cartoons, death announcement posters, and vehicle inscriptions (`mottonyms'). Regarding the Ghanaian popular video-films, I examine how the films (re)present the issue of cyberfraud (`sakawa') in Ghana. I contrast the films' (re)presentation of this phenomenon vis-a-vis that of certain official pronouncements on the issue, and argue that a critical approach to the `sakawa film series' reveals a robust counter discourse to official denunciations. My investigation of political cartoons, examines some of the works of the artist Akosua in the Ghanaian newspaper, Daily Guide. Here I focus on how Akosua's works, utilizing popular cultural allusions, function as an alternative media discourse in contemporary Ghanaian sociopolitical debates. As regards the death-announcement posters, I investigate how, situated as they are within certain well-known Ghanaian cultural values and practices, including funerary caskets, these posters remediate these cultural mores in the context of rapid social change. Lastly, regarding the mottonyms, I explore, through interviews with vehicle owners, the interactions between specific life experiences that spurred them to coin these inscriptions and the cultural fabric within which they have done so. Conceptually, this dissertation draws not only from cultural anthropology and its subfields of visual culture, and religion, media and culture, but also significantly from global/international media studies and from emergent works on African cultural and media studies. The harnessing of interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks, such as phenomenological and social constructionist approaches, to interrogate Ghanaian popular visual media in this dissertation advances our current thinking in the above-mentioned fields in several ways. For example, the social constructionist (Lee-Hurwitz 1995; Morgan 2005) and phenomenological approaches (Langsdorf, 1994; Lanigan 1998) that guide the investigation of vehicle inscriptions and death-announcement posters reveal purposeful intentionality in human communication. Furthermore, this dissertation, with its focus on popular video-films, press cartoons, death-announcement posters and vehicle inscriptions concretely elucidates recent expansive theorizations of `media'. Here `media' is understood as practices of mediation (de Vries 2001; Meyer 2003; Zito 2008), and broadly conceived to transcend narrowly defined traditional mass media formats (Downing 1996). In the latter case, I advocate for global/international media scholars to begin to pay equal `field service' to popular media artifacts within the current ambit of the `practice paradigm' in global/international media studies (Postill 2010:4; Couldry 2004).