Voices of Ghana

Voices of Ghana PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789988882907
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description

Voices of Ghana

Voices of Ghana PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789988882907
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Female Voices from an Ewe Dance-drumming Community in Ghana

Female Voices from an Ewe Dance-drumming Community in Ghana PDF Author: James M. Burns
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754664956
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
James Burns provides a detailed ethnography of a group of female musicians from the Dzigbordi community dance-drumming club from the rural town of Dzodze, located in South-Eastern Ghana. Dzigbordi is part of a genre known as adekede, or female songs of redress, where women musicians critique gender relations in society. Burns uses audio and video interviews, recordings of rehearsals and performances and detailed collaborative analyses of song texts, dance routines and performance practice to address important methodological shifts in ethnomusicology that outline a more humanistic perspective of music cultures. The book will appeal to those interested in African Studies, Gender Studies and Oral Literature, as well as ethnomusicology and includes a DVD documentary.

Voices of African Women

Voices of African Women PDF Author: Johanna Bond
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Voices of African Women is a collection of essays by accomplished women's rights lawyers from Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania. In the last decade, women's human rights have been the focus of significant attention at the international level. There remains, however, a dearth of information concerning the application and relevance of international norms at grassroots levels within Africa. There are few works about women's human rights within Africa that are actually written by African women lawyers and human rights activists. This book offers a glimpse into the lives of women in Ghana, Uganda, and Tanzania; it describes -- in their own words -- the challenges these activists face in implementing international human rights norms at the local and national levels. "The contributors are a unique set of talented analysts... Introductions for each chapter are by Johanna Bond, whose precise summaries and analyses of the topics systematize what would otherwise be repetitive evidence found in similar circumstances in these African countries. Summing Up: Recommended." -- CHOICE Magazine, November 2005 "The book is well worth space on...professionals' bookshelves." -- African Studies Association, 2006 "The book is useful and essential reading for anyone interested in women's rights in Africa. This has to be the most detailed and up-to-date book on women's rights in this region." -- Modern African Studies

Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra

Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra PDF Author: Steven Feld
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351625
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
The distinguished scholar Steven Feld shaped the field of the anthropology of sound and music. In this new work, he looks at the vernacular cosmopolitanism of a group of jazz players in Ghana, including some who have traveled widely, played with American jazz greats, and blended Coltrane with local instruments and philosophy. He describes their cosmopolitan outlook as an accoustemology, a way of knowing the world through sound. Feld combines memoir, biography, ethnography, and history, telling a story of diasporic intimacy and dialogue that contests both American nationalist and Afrocentric narrations of jazz history.

Making Men in Ghana

Making Men in Ghana PDF Author: Stephan Miescher
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253217868
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
By featuring the life histories of eight senior men, Making Men in Ghana explores the changing meaning of becoming a man in modern Africa. Stephan F. Miescher concentrates on the ideals and expectations that formed around men who were prominent in their communities when Ghana became an independent nation. Miescher shows how they negotiated complex social and economic transformations and how they dealt with their mounting obligations and responsibilities as leaders in their kinship groups, churches, and schools. Not only were notions about men and masculinity shaped by community standards, but they were strongly influenced by imported standards that came from missionaries and other colonial officials. As he recounts the life histories of these men, Miescher reveals that the passage to manhood—and a position of power, seniority, authority, and leadership—was not always welcome or easy. As an important foil for studies on women and femininity, this groundbreaking book not only explores masculinity and ideals of male behavior, but offers a fresh perspective on African men in a century of change.

The Ghana Reader

The Ghana Reader PDF Author: Kwasi Konadu
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082237496X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Covering 500 years of Ghana's history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation. Whether discussing the Asante kingdom and the Gold Coast's importance to European commerce and transatlantic slaving, Ghana's brief period under British colonial rule, or the emergence of its modern democracy, the volume's eighty selections emphasize Ghana's enormous symbolic and pragmatic value to global relations. They also demonstrate that the path to fully understanding Ghana requires acknowledging its ethnic and cultural diversity and listening to its population's varied voices. Readers will encounter selections written by everyone from farmers, traders, and the clergy to intellectuals, politicians, musicians, and foreign travelers. With sources including historical documents, poems, treaties, articles, and fiction, The Ghana Reader conveys the multiple and intersecting histories of Ghana's development as a nation, its key contribution to the formation of the African diaspora, and its increasingly important role in the economy and politics of the twenty-first century.

Beneath the Surface

Beneath the Surface PDF Author: Lynn M. Thomas
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478007052
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
For more than a century, skin lighteners have been a ubiquitous feature of global popular culture—embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond. Analyzing a wide range of archival, popular culture, and oral history sources, Thomas traces the changing meanings of skin color from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. From indigenous skin-brightening practices and the rapid spread of lighteners in South African consumer culture during the 1940s and 1950s to the growth of a billion-dollar global lightener industry, Thomas shows how the use of skin lighteners and experiences of skin color have been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and segregation as well as by consumer capitalism, visual media, notions of beauty, and protest politics. In teasing out lighteners’ layered history, Thomas theorizes skin as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade PDF Author: Anne Bailey
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807055190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
It's an awful story. It's an awful story. Why do you want to bring this up now?--Chief Awusa of Atorkor For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"-share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade. Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories that were handed down through generations, Bailey finds that, although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. In this unprecedented and revelatory book, Bailey explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory.

The Way North

The Way North PDF Author: Ron Riekki
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814338666
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
It will be welcomed by readers interested in new fiction and poetry and instructors of courses on Michigan writing.

A Dam for Africa

A Dam for Africa PDF Author: Stephan F. Miescher
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253059984
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
Since its construction in the early 1960s, the hydroelectric Akosombo Dam across the Volta River has exemplified the possibilities and challenges of development in Ghana. Drawing upon a wealth of sources, A Dam for Africa investigates contrasting stories about how this dam has transformed a West African nation, while providing a model for other African countries. The massive Akosombo Dam is the keystone of the Volta River Project that includes a large manmade lake 250 miles long, the VALCO aluminum smelter, new cities and towns, a deep-sea harbor, and an electrical grid. On the local level, Akosombo has meant access to electricity for people in urban and industrial areas across southern Ghana. For others, Akosombo inflicted tremendous social and environmental costs. The dam altered the ecology of the Lower Volta, displaced 80,000 people in the Volta Basin, and affected the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Ghanaians. In A Dam for Africa, Stephan Miescher explores four intersecting narratives: Ghanaian debates and aspirations about modernization in the context of decolonization and Cold War; international efforts of the US aluminum industry to benefit from Akosombo through cheap electricity for their VALCO smelter; local stories of upheaval and devastation in resettlement towns; and a nation-wide quest toward electrification and energy justice during times of economic crises, droughts, and climate change.