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Date added: 11.4.2015
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Crafting Intercultural Desire: Transforming Nation, Art, and Personhood in Ghana, is an historical and ethnographic examination of the rise and fall of different art worlds, genres and identities under colonial, national, and neoliberal regimes.MoreCrafting Intercultural Desire: Transforming Nation, Art, and Personhood in Ghana, is an historical and ethnographic examination of the rise and fall of different art worlds, genres and identities under colonial, national, and neoliberal regimes. Despite changes across time, art worlds in Ghana always engage a global audience and thus serve as crucial arenas of global contact and possibility on the one hand, and challenges to and redefinitions of the nation, on the other. As always in the postcolonial world, the collision with the West raises fundamental questions about what is needed to be a proper person. These intercultural collisions not only transform ideas of personhood but can disrupt social hierarchies, as art is differently signified or more highly valued in global marketplaces than among Ghanaians. In this context, careers in the arts and artist identities are ways to fight marginalization, to become a visible, valuable, viable person. The dissertation opens with four life histories exemplifying different trajectories in the art world based on age, education, and class. The next chapter is historical and looks at the colonial period as the moment when the category of art is invented in Ghana. Following it is a chapter on the nationalization and national politics of art from 1957 to 2005. Following that are two chapters about craft---the first looks at the formation of the Arts Centre as a multiethnic microcosm of the nation, and the second looks at the Rastafarian youth culture which has emerged there in the neoliberal era. Recurring tropes in the dissertation include: the intercultural nature of both art and craft in terms of their emergence, imagination, circulation, and consumption- the distinction between art and craft, which emerges as one with colonial roots based on class and education- the ongoing power of age hierarchy and age-based relations on everyday life in Ghana- the complicated nature of nationalist sentiment in postcolonial countries where subjects are forced to look outward for economic support. Crafting intercultural desire: Transforming nation, art, and personhood in Ghana. by Ruti Talmor
