RESEARCH FOCUS GROUP: African Studies
Tuesday, December 5 / 5:30 PM
IHC Research Seminar Room, HSSB 6056
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Bianca Murillo (History, UCSB) “Gender
and the Politics of Consumption in Twentieth Century
Ghana” This study examines the development
of consumer culture in Ghana between 1930-1975, a period
that encompasses British colonial rule, rapid urbanization,
cocoa industry booms and busts, war, global depression,
political independence, and post-colonial state formation. During
these forty-five years, access to cash and consumer
goods became increasingly important, drastically changing
social structures and redefining relationships between
men and women. This dissertation specifically
focuses on the role of household commodities in shaping
new ideas about the home, marriage, family, and the
gendered division of labor. After independence in 1957,
Ghana played host to a variety of popular and widely
attended consumer-orientated events promoting new products
for the home. Sponsored by the state and local businessmen
and backed by foreign capital these shows rested on
breaking with the past and positioning older lifestyles
and local market structures as out-of-step with modern
development. I argue that politics, global capitalism,
and notions of gender and domesticity placed concerns
about home at the center of national debates about
modernization and progress. Drawing upon government
documents, advertisements, oral interviews, court records,
company archives, and popular literature this project
examines how broadly these ideas circulated and the
extent to which aspirations and desires for an "ideal
home" contributed to reshaping new social and
gendered identities between and among ordinary Ghanaian
men and women.
Timothy Mechlinski (Sociology, UCSB) “Making
it Across the Border: The Social Interaction of Mobility
Control in West Africa” The vast majority
of people moving between two West African countries
do so over land, and using some means of public transportation
and migration in the region is largely circular in
nature and is characterized by its irregularity in
terms of documentation. Here I describe and analyze
the ways in which people actually move internally and
internationally in the region. Based on ethnographic
fieldwork conducted in four West African countries,
and interviews with transportation workers, I discuss
the role of transportation workers in facilitating
migration in the region and conclude that they play
a central role in organizing the migration process
and mediating between migrants and border security
agents, without which migrants (and goods) would not
and could not reach their destinations. These arrangements
differ from those described for clandestine migration
between Latin American countries and the United States
in substantive and important ways. This discussion
offers lessons for, and expands on, the current thinking
on migrant networks prevalent in the social science
literature.
Sponsored by the IHC’s African Studies Research
Focus Group
