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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Exhibiting Ghana: Display, Documentary, and 'National' Art in the Nkrumah Era
Author:Hess, JanetISNI
Year:2001
Periodical:African Studies Review
Volume:44
Issue:1
Period:April
Pages:59-77
Language:English
Geographic term:Ghana
Subjects:exhibitions
nationalism
politicians
visual arts
Architecture and the Arts
Literature, Mass Media and the Press
Politics and Government
About person:Francis Nwia Kofie Nkrumah (1909-1972)ISNI
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/525392
Abstract:The privileging of representation as means of securing epistemological or ideological systems has been regarded as a Western phenomenon. The employment of cultural exhibitions, documentaries, and spectacle to advance systems of authority, however is also characteristic of African political systems in the pre- and postcolonial eras. This article examines the conceptualization and construction by the Nkrumah administration of the Ghanaian 'national' culture. Although most of the confidential cabinet minutes from the independence era were destroyed, records remain in the Ghanaian National Archives which reveal a particular administrative perspective on national exhibition policy and which demonstrate the supression and cooptation of regional, and particularly Asante, display. The author analyses archival records thet remain from the Nkrumah era, and explores the manner in which exhibitions, documentaries, representations of Kwame Nkrumah, and art commissioned from designated 'national' artists manifested nationalist ideology in postcolonial Ghana. Bibliogr., ref., sum. in English and French.
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