Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa: Nation and African Modernity(Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora)

Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa changes dominant ideas about Africa's relations with modernity and the global history of nationalism by recovering, and bringing fresh interpretations to, a modern genealogy of African nationalist theory. This is done by examining the writing of intellectuals from preindependence Ghana from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, writers who operated self-consciously in a Pan-African ideological framework. By confronting the concept of "the African Nation" under the colonial order, the book argues, these writer-intellectuals were also confronting modernity in ways that would be important to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa is affiliated with recent revisionary works that have demonstrated the conceptual and existential validity of "alternative modernities." This book proposes in this regard to shift our understanding of the modern from a securely and exclusively Western mode of being to the modern as relational and inclusively intercultural. It mobilizes this relational and intercultural conception to locate and outline "African modernity." Additionally,Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa demonstrates why and how projections of, and debates about, "African modernity" have been more than a continental affair. This book locates African modernity at the core of the activist intellection of the internationalist and black Atlantic nationalism of Pan-Africanism. Hence it comprehensively relates the thought of African Americans (Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright), and West Indians (George Padmore, C.L.R. James), to that of seminal anglophone West African thinkers like E. W. Blyden, Africanus Horton, J. E. Casely Hayford, and Kwame Nkrumah. Finally, Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa extends its modernist insights about African nationalism and Pan-Africanism globally, into critical cultural, historical, and theoretical reformulations.

Table of Contents:
Here, There and Everywhere: Modernity in Question Impossible Necessities: Reading an African Formation in Contradiction Imperial Exchanges, Postimperial Reconfigurations: Africa in the Modern, the Modern in Africa Worlding Nativity: Early Gold Coast Culturalist Imperatives and Nationalist Initiatives On the Road to Ghana: Negotiations, Paradoxes, Pratfalls Faust in Africa: Genealogy of a "Messenger Class" Black Orpheus; or the (Modernist) Return of the Native Prometheus Unbound: Nkrumah's Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah Ethical Transnationalism, Postcolonialism, the Black Atlantic: Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa vis-a-vis the Contemporary Revisionisms

Review :
Writing Ghana is an elegantly written and meticulously researched history of intellectual self-assertion in colonial West Africa . . . This book is an impressive and major addition to existing research on elite culture in nineteenth-century West Africa. It has relevance for scholars of colonial and also postcolonial African literatures, for Korang produces a fresh view of modernity and nationalism.