The Ghana Studies Association: Looking Ahead

This special 20th-anniversary issue of Ghana Studies also celebrates the 30th anniversary of the Ghana Studies Association (GSA), an occasion that was marked by a GSA-sponsored roundtable at the 60th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association in Chicago in November 2017. Participants at the roundtable mapped out the ways in which the study of Ghana (and the GSA itself) has changed over time in terms of areas of focus, methodological approaches, and participation by scholars in different geographic and disciplinary locations. The roundtable also provided a forum for the Ghana Studies community to reflect on its scholarship in the past and present, and to celebrate the path-breaking scholars who have shaped research on Ghana.

This anniversary volume is inspired by the forum and, therefore, includes essays from pioneers who were present at the start of our association and others who have helped to map out our journey since. As the president of the GSA in its 30th year, my task is to help us reflect on the decades ahead. In this short piece, I want to suggest that the future of the GSA lies in a more purposeful and sustained effort to bridge the geographical, disciplinary, and generational distances between current and prospective members of our association in order to build a meaningfully multilocal, multildisciplinary, and multigenerational association.

It is self-evident that a Ghana Studies association should have a strong membership of scholars based in Ghana, not least because that is a necessary precondition for the long-term project of decolonization of African Studies, to which Jean Allman's 2018 ASA Presidential Lecture speaks.¹ In my first ASA meeting as a graduate student in the early 2000s, I met only the few Ghana-based participants who had significant US networks and funding to attend ASA meetings, which were the focal point of GSA activities. There are more Ghana-based members now in the GSA, and more Africa-based participants at ASA meetings generally. Moreover, the ASA in recent years has evinced a greater awareness of the need to see the continent as more than a place for fieldwork and has sought more meaningful engagement with African scholars/hip by, among other things, partnering with African institutions to organize conferences that speak to contemporary concerns on the continent.² It is fair to say that the GSA has been ahead of its parent organization in this effort, in ways big and small. It is significant that GSA members elected their first Ghana-based president in 2014.³ I see this step as a culmination of a number of initiatives over time, including the convention of having two coeditors for Ghana Studies, one based in Ghana and one in the United States, and the institution of an annual research grant for Ghana-based scholars that both contributes to homegrown scholarship and serves to introduce a new generation of Ghanaian scholars to the GSA. Arguably, the most important of such initiatives is the GSA triennial conference, the first of which was held in Kumasi in May 2013. The second, in July 2016 in Cape Coast, drew an even larger number of scholars—including many graduate students and younger faculty in various disciplines from Ghana, the US, and Europe—and was widely considered to be a success in terms of both scholarly engagement and collegiality.⁴ With the third conference scheduled for July 2019 at the University of Ghana, we hope to continue to deepen the connections among our membership and, in particular, to provide scholars in Ghana who might not otherwise be able to attend ASA meetings the opportunity to have their ideas added to and enriched by this form and space of intellectual exchange.

Multilocality has implications for our disciplinary makeup. African Studies in the United States is dominated by certain disciplines (notably history, anthropology, and political science) for reasons that have much to do with the history of area studies in the US (Zeleza, 2009). As we move toward a more balanced representation of GSA members inside and outside Ghana, we will be urgently confronted with questions about the...