Imagined Nations: Art in Nkrumah-Era Ghana

While the imposition of colonial authority had demonstrable effects on artistic production in Africa, we have yet to fully understand the manner in which different alliances of power responded to that authority. A critical aspect of the effort to articulate different notions of the "nation" in post-colonial art, and a phenomenon which has been insufficiently explored, is the employment and negotiation of modernity. In this dissertation I undertake an examination of the relationship between nationalism, modernism, and art production in Ghana, as well as a discussion of manifestations of nationalism in the present-day Ghanaian state. In the first two chapters of my dissertation I undertake an analysis of representations of nationalism associated with political parties in the Ghanaian independence era. The iconography of the dominant party focused on representations of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, and in chapter one I explore the reliance on Nkrumah as a metaphorical allusion to political emancipation and panAfrican unity. In the second chapter I examine the efforts on the part of the Asante opposition to invoke in its iconography a historical legacy of hegemony. For both Asante chiefs and the emergent Asante entrepreneurial class, a critical mechanism in consolidating political allegiance was the invocation of historical representations of authority, and I discuss the role of these representations in constructing an alternative notion of "nation." In attempting to construct an ideology of statehood which would supercede existing loyalties and affiliations, the administration of Nkrumah both encouraged investment in the arts and questioned the viability of subnational cultural traditions. In the third chapter of my dissertation I examine this tension between the Nkrumah administration's promotion of the arts and its advocacy of an aesthetic philosophy of generalized "Africanity." The fourth chapter examines Ghanaian architecture and spatial organization, artistic forms which clearly reveal the relationship between a legacy of colonial rule and perceptions of nationalism. The spatial organisation and architecture of the Asante capital of Kumasi and the Ghanaian capital of Accra suggest that divergent responses were offered to the imposition of colonial authority, and I discuss the manner in which urban development in Kumasi and Accra has reflected a struggle between power alliances in the postcolonial era. In the concluding chapter of my dissertation, I address a phenomenon that was instrumental in the effort of the nineteenth-century Asante to construct a national culture, the pre-colonial festival known as odwira. Through the odwira, the Asante secured an association between the hierarchy of state authority and art which articulated-and ultimately constituted-the fundamental values of Asante society. While the odwira declined in significance following the colonial occupation of Asante, I argue that artistic representations and institutions associated with the odwira-notably those incorporated into the akwasidae and the recent anniversary celebration of the Asantehene Otumfuo Opoku Ware II-manifest an ongoing struggle over nationalism.