0000000000146823
AUTHOR
Konstanze N'guessan
FATHERS AND CHILDREN OF IVORIAN INDEPENDENCE: METAPHORS OF KINSHIP AND GENERATION IN THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL TIME
I look at the image of a generation of youth as the vanguard force of an ongoing struggle for independence and a new nation on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Ivorian independence. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Reinhart Koselleck, I explore the making of national time as layered temporality, with generations not succeeding each other but rather coexisting. My analysis of expressions and performances of ‘doing being youth’ helps in understanding how the label ‘youth’ is used to mark membership in or exclusion from a collective. I examine the process of how ‘youth’ is made into a meaningful marker and how and why political actors engage in performances of ‘being youth’…
The bureaucratic making of national culture in North-Western Ghana
In this article I explore the making of national culture through bureaucratic routines in the Centre for National Culture in Wa, North-Western Ghana. I focus on an aspect of bureaucracy that is usually left aside: the productivity and creativity of bureaucratic routines. State, nation and culture are not fixed entities, but have to be constantly produced through processes of negotiation and meaning-making and through the continual reproduction of their boundaries and the categories that determine what is to be promoted or preserved. Bureaucratic routines and administrative processes are analysed as practices objectifying and nationalising culture and naturalising the boundaries and categori…
Embodying the nation: The production of sameness and difference in national-day parades
National-day parades constitute a common format of embodying the nation. Composed of numerous distinct bodies of persons with individual characteristics (being short or tall) and multilayered societal roles (being a nurse, a father etc.), parades primarily evoke an image of sameness, while they also display differences. Focusing on the preparation of the Burkinabè national-day parades, this paper explores practices of disciplining bodies and making them appear similar and/or different. We ask how national-day parades mirror and produce images of the nation and how they treat differences like sex, ethnic belonging and occupation. The paper highlights that performances of the nation, as prod…
‘Independence is not given, it is taken’: the Ivorian cinquantenaire and competing history/ies of independence
This article explores competing histories of independence in Cote d'Ivoire. The 2010 commemoration of fifty years of independence led to competing histories about how and if the nation achieved independence in 1960. The postelectoral crisis of 2010–2011 that followed soon afterwards has been interpreted by supporters of the outgoing president Laurent Gbagbo as an attempt by France and the international community to re-colonise Cote d'Ivoire. The article asks how different versions of this history are connected to different political projects and how they have changed through time. The article will analyse these processes of meaning-making in a historiology of Ivorian independence, thus cont…
Performing the national territory: The geography of national-day celebrations
The nation is a relatively abstract imagined community that is visualised through a variety of symbols as well as communicative and performative practices. In this paper, we explore how the national territory, one of the foundations of the nation-state, is performed on national-day celebrations and brings the nation into being. Drawing on ethnographic research on national days in Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, we show how the state's internal administrative divisions and ethnic differences are at once made explicit but also subordinated to the nation. Moreover, we show how in such celebrations, potentially disruptive or competing affiliations such as ethnicity and regional loyalties…