Introduction: Revisiting Modernization in Ghana

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 3 INTRODUCTION Revisiting Modernization in Ghana PETER J. BLOOM TAKYIWAA MANUH STEPHAN F. MIESCHER Preamble This special issue is the result of an interdisciplinary academic conference, Revisiting Modernization, with an accompanying array of activities. They included multiple performances, film screenings, an art exhibit, and creative writers’ competition for unpublished Ghanaian writers. The event was held at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, July 27–July 31, 2009. The Institute of African Studies in collaboration with the University of California African Studies Multi-Campus Research Group inaugurated an inclusive approach to thinking about the resonance of modernization in relation to the contemporary discourse of globalization and the shifting parameters of development. This event was conceived as a forum with pre-circulated papers and contributions from a wide range of academics, policymakers, and artists from the African continent, North America, Europe, and beyond. The call for papers invited academic interventions that explored the significance of modernization on the African continent from critically informed perspectives in the humanities and social sciences that included historical, socio-anthropological, literary, art historical, as well as cultural and media studies approaches. The conference facilitated a collective reflection on the nature of modernization as it has been inflected and transformed since the era of African independence. In addition to evoking the role of transnational developments across the Global South as an important site of inquiry, the conference sought to critically examine points of departure for and appropriations of modernization. Unlike most work on 4 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 modernization that privileged approaches typically associated with Western technological expertise and historical experience, the conference interrogated new ways of imagining modernization as a critique of ethnocentric developmentalism. Modernization as a series of discourses and desires was the overarching theme for the conference and was used to specify questions of policy, culture, development, and its location in African Studies. The conception and planning of the conference was a collaborative effort that was led by the editors of this special issue. In concert with the launching of the UC Multi-Campus Research Group in African Studies, Peter Bloom and Stephan Miescher met with Takyiwaa Manuh, then director of the Institute of African Studies, to develop the conference theme. Modernization became a point of intersection during our discussions because of its resonance in Ghana and in contemporary approaches to African Studies in North America. Although modernization has been repudiated in Europe and North America as a failed enterprise (Tipps 1973), in Ghana as elsewhere on the African continent, the luster and aspirations connected with modernization remain vital. We were interested in exploring these implied tensions and in creating a bridge between modernization and debates around modernity through a series of academic interventions and activities . The conference, therefore, was based on scholarship that addressed the interrelationships between the concept of modernity and the legacy of modernization theory.1 The Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, founded in 1961 and inaugurated by President Kwame Nkrumah in 1963, was a shining example of the modernization paradigm and promise of academic achievement on the African continent in the post-independence period. Many of 1. We are referring here to a vast literature that includes Anderson 1991; Apter 1965; Appadurai 1996; Arndt 1987; Chatterjee 1986; Cooper 2005; Deutsch et al. 2002; Eisenstadt 1966; Ferguson 1999, 2006; Gaonkar 2001; Geschiere et al. 2008; Gyekye 1997; Kabou 1991; Knauft 2002; Mbembe and Nuttall 2008; Piot 1999; Tipps 1973. Bloom, Manuh, and Miescher • Introduction 5 the best known Africanist scholars came to the University of Ghana during this period and participated in the activities of the Institute. The Ghana Dance Ensemble was also founded as part of the Institute’s broader mission . Thus, it was only fitting that the academic proceedings of this conference were held in the J. H. Kwabena Nketia conference room. Professor Nketia served as the first African director of the Institute and honored us with his presence for the duration of the five-day conference. The conference also coincided with the final days of Professor...