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ID: 135279

Bureaucratic making of national culture in North-Western Ghana / N'guessan, Konstanze

N'Guessan, Konstanze	Article
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Summary/Abstract

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 categories created through the cultural officers' practices.

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ID: 120369

Independence is not given, it is taken: the Ivorian cinquantenaire and competing history/ies of independence / N'Guessan, Konstanze

N'Guessan, Konstanze	Journal Article
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2013.

Summary/Abstract

This article explores competing histories of independence in Côte 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 Côte 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 contributing to constructivist accounts of nationhood, collective memory and historiography. The paper thus argues that different media of recalling the past in the present, such as commemoration and historiography, should be studied in a complementary manner to understand how (joint) remembering and forgetting are tools and mirrors of nations at work.

Key Words

Historiography ; Commemoration ; Independence day ; Côte d'Ivoire ; Laurent Gbagbo ; Nationalist History

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