The Upper Guinea Coast In Global Perspective

For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the world engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange, and conflict. This book examines how such encounters have continued into the present day. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

Introduction: the Upper Guinea coast in global perspective / Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl -- Towards a definition of transnational as a family construct : an historical and micro perspective / Bruce L. Mouser -- Lusocreole culture and identity compared : the cases of Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka / Christoph Kohl -- Freetown's Yoruba-modelled secret societies as transnational and trans-ethnic mechanisms for social integration / Nathaniel King -- Contested transnational spaces : debating emigrants' citizenship and role in Guinean politics / Anita Schroven -- Identity beyond ID-- diaspora within the nation / Markus Rudolf -- The African "other" in the Cape Verde Islands : interaction, integration and the forging of an immigration policy / Pedro F. José Marcelino -- Celebrating asymmetries-- Creole stratification and the regrounding of home in Cape Verdean migrant return visits / Heike Drotbohm -- Travelling terms : analysis of semantic fluctuations in the Atlantic world / Wilson Trajano Filho -- Rice and revolution : agrarian life and global food policy on the Upper Guinea coast / Joanna Davidson -- Transnational and local models of non-refoulement : youth and women in the moral economy of patronage in post-war Liberia and Sierra Leone / William P. Murphy -- Expanding the space for freedom of expression in post-war Sierra Leone / Sylvanus Spencer -- Sierra Leone, child soldiers, and global flows of child protection expertise / Susan Shepler -- The "Mandingo question" : transnational ethnic identity and violent conflict in an Upper Guinea border area / Christian K. Højbjerg -- Solo Darboe, former diamond dealer : transnational connections and home politics in the twentieth-century Gambia / Alice Bellagamba -- Market networks and warfare : a comparison of the seventeenth century blade weapons trade and the nineteenth century firearms trade in the Casamance / Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta

For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics and various other social phenomena. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.

This book examines the radical changes in social and political landscape of the Upper Guinea Coast region over the past 30 years as a result of civil wars, post-war interventions by international, humanitarian agencies and peacekeeping missions, as well as a regional public health crisis (Ebola epidemic). The emphasis on ‘crises’ in this book draws attention to the intense socio-transformations in the region over the last three decades. Contemporary crises and changes in the region provoke a challenge to accepted ways of understanding and imagining socio-political life in the region – whether at the level of subnational and national communities, or international and regional structures of interest, such as refugees, weapon trafficking, cross-border military incursions, regional security, and transnational epidemics. This book explores and transcends the central explanatory tropes that have oriented research on the region and re-evaluates them in the light of the contemporary structural dynamics of crises, changes and continuities.

Creolization and pidginization are conceptualized and investigated as specific social processes in the course of which new common languages, socio-cultural practices and identifications are developed in contexts of postcolonial diversity shaped by distinct social, historical and local conditions.

Taking a multidisciplinary and global approach, this edited book examines the dynamic role of plantations as productive, socio-political and ecological forms throughout imperial and post-colonial worlds spanning multiple and broad temporalities. Showcasing an expansive range of case studies across different geographies, the collection sheds light on the heterogeneity of plantations and offers insights into the afterlives, spectres and remnants of systems that have been analysed as schemes of production, extraction and authority. Focusing on the expansion of plantation systems throughout various political-economic and ecological projects, and across the modern (and post-modern) period, allows the authors to move beyond analyses that often deal with individual empires through human-centered lenses. The contributors explore resistance to the mechanisms of extraction and control that plantations and their afterlives demanded, shedding light on their excesses, contradictions, failures and deviations. Offering a comprehensive treatment of global plantations, this book provides valuable reading for researchers with an interest in the socio-political and environmental effects of colonialism and imperialism in their various guises. Chapters 1, 8 and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Walter Rodney is revered throughout the Caribbean as a teacher, a hero, and a martyr. This book remains the foremost work on the region.

This book investigates how cooking, eating, and identity are connected to the local micro-climates in each of Ghana’s major eco-culinary zones. The work is based on several years of researching Ghanaian culinary history and cuisine, including field work, archival research, and interdisciplinary investigation. The political economy of Ghana is used as an analytical framework with which to investigate the following questions: How are traditional food production structures in Ghana coping with global capitalist production, distribution, and consumption? How do land, climate, and weather structure or provide the foundation for food consumption and how does that affect the separate traditional and capitalist production sectors? Despite the post WWII food fight that launched Ghana’s bid for independence from the British empire, Ghana’s story demonstrates the centrality of local foods and cooking to its national character. The cultural weight of regional traditional foods, their power to satisfy, and the overall collective social emphasis on the ‘proper’ meal, have persisted in Ghana, irrespective of centuries of trade with Europeans. This book will be of interest to scholars in food studies, comparative studies, and African studies, and is sure to capture the interest of students in new ways.