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 With sources including historical documents, poems, treaties, articles, and fiction, The Ghana Reader conveys the multiple and intersecting histories of Ghana's development as a nation, its key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.
ISBN-13: 9780822359920
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication Date: 02-03-2016
Pages: 496
Product Dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)
Series: World Readers
Kwasi Konadu is Professor of History at the City University of New York and the author of The Akan Diaspora in the Americas and Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888. Clifford C. Campbell received his Ph.D. from the University of Ghana, Legon, and writes about African and African diaspora history.
What People are Saying About This
Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music - Jesse Weaver Shipley
"An important and timely book, The Ghana Reader fills the crucial need to better understand a nation that occupies a privileged place in pan-African-oriented life and is increasingly central to economic, political, and cultural cosmopolitanism. Insightfully framing the complexity of Ghanaian history and life and opening up paths for future study, The Ghana Reader will appeal to students and general readers alike."
Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War - Charles Piot
"Ghana captures all that is West Africa today—its hope and promise, its turbulent politics, its proud but vexed history, its vibrant popular culture, its long engagement with pan-Africanist thought and aspiration. The Ghana Reader does full and eloquent justice to Ghana’s rowdy and cacophonous history and to its luminous promise. The book’s judicious and broad-ranging set of selections will serve as a brilliant primer for non-Ghana scholars and students—and travelers and tourists—and as a stimulating reminder for the already-initiated."
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
I. One Nation, Many Histories 17
II. Between the Sea and the Savanna, 1500–1700 81
III. Commerce and the Scrambles for Africa, 1700–1900 125
IV. Colonial Rule and Political Independence, 1900–1957 207
V. Independece, Coups, and the Republic, 1957–Present 299
VI. The Exigencies of a Postcolony 361
Suggestions for Further Reading 457
Acknowledgments of Copyrights and Sources 461
Index 469
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