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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Exhibiting Ghana: Display, Documentary, and 'National' Art in the Nkrumah Era |
Author: | Hess, Janet |
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) |
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. |