2026-06-26 –, Room 403 PC Desk (Seats 30)
This panel examines how Ghanaians have imagined, navigated, and reshaped the wider world across two+ centuries, using worlding as an analytic to foreground how global visions are generated from particular West African places. We note that Ghanaian worlding’s are often left out of the global ‘world history’ picture, as are many others. Jennifer Hart’s presentation explores Accra as a site where imperial planners, development agencies, and diasporic cultural currents projected competing global ideals—from “model colony” to “capital of cool”—and shows how residents fashioned urban lives that engaged, contested, and reworked these shifting imaginaries. Trevor Getz’s analysis turns to late-nineteenth-century Cape Coast, where Anglophone communities avidly debated global politics, science, religion, and culture. Drawing on AI-assisted analysis of Gold Coast newspapers, it reveals a richly textured public sphere in which Gold Coasters interpreted events from Liverpool to India to the Americas, crafting their own sense of the world and their place within it. Finally, Tony Yeboah examines Kumase’s courtyard architecture as a material expression of transnational life. It traces how colonial interventions and later the remittance-funded building practices of Asante burgers reshaped domestic space and social relationships, producing built forms that make visible the region’s evolving weltanschauung. Together, these papers illuminate the diverse ways Ghanaians have worlded the world.
Africa
Worlding
worldview
Ghana
Immigration, remittances, and the architectural landscape of Kumase, Ghana
Abstract for Additional Participant 1:This presentation focuses on the courtyard, (aduho), as the material site of entanglements between immigration and architecture in Kumase, capital of the Asante kingdom, in modern Ghana. Using archival documents, qualitative interviews with Asante immigrants, (burgers), in Europe and North America and other interlocutors, I explain how Asante burgers have influenced residential architecture and courtyard cultures, and how this has in turn affected the weltanschauung of the region. Remittances from the burgers influenced residential design in the capital, and this intensified the processes of architectural modification, which was initiated under British colonial rule in the early twentieth century. I explore two layers of aesthetic architectural alteration and their impact on communal relationships, demonstrating their hegemonic control through the institutional structures and built environment imposed by the British colonial regime, and later, the performance of home—built and lived in—by the Asante burgers.
Title for Additional Participant 2:Living in a Model City: Negotiating Global Ideals and Local Realities in Ghana’s Capital
Abstract for Additional Participant 2:As the capital of the Gold Coast Colony since 1874 and the modern nation-state of Ghana since 1957, Accra has long been the subject of global conversations and imaginations, connected to global networks and systems. Those imaginations have cast the city in various roles in relation to both national and global imaginaries: the capital of Britain’s model colony, as a cocoa capital, as the capital of the Black Star of Africa, as the World Bank’s star pupil, and as the capital of cool. This presentation explores the ways in which residents of Accra navigated these shifting imaginaries and crafted meaningful lives and urban cultures for themselves that engaged, transcended, and contested shifted global expectations over the course of the 20th century.
Title for Additional Participant 3:The world from 19th century Gold Coast: talking, debating, gossiping
Abstract for Additional Participant 3:Anglophone communities in late 19th century Gold Coast, especially the city of Cape Coast, had a lot to say about the world outside their community and colony. They discussed new ideas like evolution, participated in global discussions about prohibition, and debated the shape of Christianity. They referenced political innovations in Germany and South America in planning for self-governance. They remarked on the state of African-Americans in the wake of the US Civil War, British policy in India, and the Franco-Prussian conflict, and wondered how these events might affect them. They obsessively followed commodity prices in Liverpool. They gossiped about the sartorial choices of British women and Sierra Leonean youths. This analysis uses AI-assisted qualitative review of 14 Gold Coast-published newspapers in the digital HistoryGenie project to propose some novel, and well-known, answers about what the late 19th century world looked like.
forthcoming
forthcoming