Ghanaian Screendance Perspectives: The Nuance of ‘Sankofaism’ as Emerging Aesthetics and Rejection of Orthodoxy (original) (raw)

Conceptualizing the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art form

Journal of African History, Culture and Arts

This paper attempts to conceptualize the stylistic body movements in contemporary Ghanaian dances through the aesthetic lenses of performance art. The expressiveness of performance art forms is frequently praised for the emotions we have toward them. These feelings are derived from the symbolic connotations and functionalities of the arts in life. Through an exploratory design of qualitative inquiry, the researchers focus on a contextual dialogue on the aesthetic visual presentations of selected contemporary Ghanaian dances as performance art forms. The critical content analysis of music videos was espoused to examine the stylistic body movements and gestures coded in some contemporary Ghanaian dances such as Azonto, Twerking, Kupe, Pilolo and Shoo as part of an empirical artistic study. Instruments for data collection were observation, document analysis and photography for the contextual visual content analyses grounded in semiotic and aesthetic theoretical discourse. This study ag...

Understanding African Dance in Context: Perspectives from Ghana

The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2017

IntroductionDance in African societies is a holistic art form that serves as a pivot around which collective community life revolves. Dance with its music as an art form has significantly become involved in the process of self-reflection and identity construction in Africa. However, this unique art form has never been free from colonial and Western influence. Colonizers of Africa, through the lens of their early anthropologists, significantly misunderstood African dance and often used foreign tools to measure it leading to the ignorance of its intrinsic elements. This paper presents a comprehensive discussion of what constitutes dance within the African tradition, using Ghanaian and Anlo-Ewe material to demonstrate the more encompassing nature of the phenomenon. My aim is to create a window through which Westerners and non-African scholars can explore, understand and appreciate dance and other cultural forms of Africa in order to address issues of identity and cultural representatio...

Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic

Dance Research Journal, 2021

Popular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.

Cultural (Mis)Representation in Ghanaian Video Film Practice

Despite their apparent simplicity and the many criticisms against them, Ghanaian video-films have often challenged established notions of culture, identity, representation and mediation. It appears that traditional modes of criticism and analysis may be inadequate in fully appreciating this contemporary practice and therefore demands a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, language and representation. At the same time the methods of cultural representation posited by a majority of contemporary video-films offer inaccurate readings of actual social and cultural practices. In this paper, I examine some popular video-films, made within the last fifteen years, using instruments in cultural studies and theories of representation and reception to argue that new methods of analysis are required to appreciate contemporary video-films within particular cultural and social contexts. However, in spite of this contextualisation, which is informed by the dialogic relationship between art and culture, I argue that it is equally pertinent to locate artistic practices within the framework of media's social advocacy, and the responsibility of realistic artistic representation of society.

Theorizing ‘Africanness’: Why ‘African Dance’ is not ‘African Dance’

Academic and intellectual discourses are still riddled with dualism. African dances are no stranger to this polarity. African dance, homogenizing as it sounds, has been widely applied to define, characterize, theorize, claim, and brand a miscellany of dances from different cultures in Uganda. In this talk, I will deconstruct “African dance” as an imaginary concept, which derives homage in western ethnocentrism. It is the concern of this presentation to reveal dance from Africa for what they are: varied, culturally specific, demographically contextualized, and geographically confined. In inverting this conventionally embraced concept, I lean on Edward Said’s theory of orientalism to advance the view that fabricating artistic homogeneity about African dances is not only intellectually and academically problematic, but it also raised questions about representation and appropriation of dance forms from Africa.

Introduction: Dance in Africa and Beyond: Creativity and Identity in a Globalized World

Critical African Studies 11(1), pp. 1-9, 2019

In this introduction to the special issue on dance in Africa and beyond, we review the anthropological study of dance in Africa since the 1920s and introduce the seven contributions, organized around the key themes of transformed identities (both contemporary and historical), decoloniality, new media, morality, and the problematic representations of African diasporic identities in contemporary Europe. With this special issue, we argue that the study of dance and music provides an important window into the myriad creative ways in which people in Africa and in the African diaspora deal with problematic situations, generate new artistic forms, engage with questions of ethics, and carve out spaces in which they experiment with novelty and reinvigorate their lives.

Post-Coloniality: Projection of Ghana In Video-Films

CINEJ Cinema Journal

The rise of the mainstream video industry has been significant towards socio-cultural and economic development in Ghana; however, this study will not focus on the impacts of the video industry of Ghana. This article primarily examines the image construction of Ghana in video-films. Over the past few years, videofilms in Post-colonial Ghana have often been critiqued by film scholars and critics for reinforcing superstitious beliefs and instigating backward tendencies that derail national development. Normative scholarships have critically explored the visuality of Ghanaian video-films and their themes. Nonetheless, these normative scholarships have often overlooked the nexus between the Ghanaian society and video texts. It is against this scholarly gap that this study engages the meta-question of how video-films project Ghana in their texts. This article will engage a critical textual reading of a few popular films from the Pentecostal and Occult genres to contextualize the ideologic...

Nigerian videos in the global arena: The postcolonial exotic revisited

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