Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana
Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic?

Routes of Remembrance tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade’s absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the country’s classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities.

Holsey’s study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory.
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Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana
Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic?

Routes of Remembrance tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade’s absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the country’s classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities.

Holsey’s study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory.
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Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana

Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana

by Bayo Holsey
Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana

Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana

by Bayo Holsey

eBook

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Overview

Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic?

Routes of Remembrance tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade’s absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the country’s classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities.

Holsey’s study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226349770
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 09/15/2008
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 272
File size: 943 KB

About the Author

Bayo Holsey is assistant professor of African & African American studies and cultural anthropology at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments      
Note on Akan Orthography   
Introduction   
 
Part 1   Sequestering the Slave Trade
1 Of Origins: Making Family, Ethnicity, Nation 
2 Conundrums of Kinship: Sequestering Slavery, Recalling Kin 
3 Displacing the Past: Imagined Geographies of Enslavement    
4 In Place of Slavery: Fashioning Coastal Identity         
5 E-Race-ing History: Schooling and National Identity  
 
Part 2   Centering the Slave Trade
6 Slavery and the Making of Black Atlantic History                  
7 Navigating New Histories     
 
Conclusion     
Notes  
Bibliography
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