Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana

by Bayo Holsey

Overview

Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic?

Routes of Remembrance tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trade’s absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the country’s classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities.

Holsey’s study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226349763
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	06/01/2008
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Bayo Holsey is assistant professor of African & African American studies and cultural anthropology at Duke University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments      
Note on Akan Orthography   
Introduction   
 
Part 1   Sequestering the Slave Trade
1 Of Origins: Making Family, Ethnicity, Nation 
2 Conundrums of Kinship: Sequestering Slavery, Recalling Kin 
3 Displacing the Past: Imagined Geographies of Enslavement    
4 In Place of Slavery: Fashioning Coastal Identity         
5 E-Race-ing History: Schooling and National Identity  
 
Part 2   Centering the Slave Trade
6 Slavery and the Making of Black Atlantic History                  
7 Navigating New Histories     
 
Conclusion     
Notes  
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"A complex and unsettling book about slavery that artfully combines historical and ethnographic scholarship. . . . This provocative and engaging book raises the larger question of the narratives black people the world over are telling about themselves."

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute - Edward M. Bruner

"In this thoughtful contribution to discussions on memory, history, and identity, anthropologist Holsey examines the memorialization of the slave trade on both sides of the Atlantic. . . . A powerful entry into understanding African silences on the slave trade. The style is lucid and engaging."

Choice

A complex and unsettling book about slavery that artfully combines historical and ethnographic scholarship. . . . This provocative and engaging book raises the larger question of the narratives black people the world over are telling about themselves.

— Edward M. Bruner

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this fascinating book. Indeed, it is rare to find such a sensitive account of how people deal with painful memories of the past and the complex social forces that dictate the shape and form that those memories of the past take.”

Jennifer Cole

Routes of Remembrance sets a new benchmark for studies of the slave trade in African and African-American memory. In an insightful ethnography of a major site of diaspora tourism, Holsey reveals the complexity of Ghanaian silences concerning the slave trade, ‘routes’ these through a contested history of European and African-American narratives, and presents a fascinating account of how a new generation reworks this history to create a new diasporic vision.”

Rosalind Shaw