A Note from the Editors

It is a pleasure to bring you the 25th volume of Ghana Studies, which will be our last as co-editors of the journal. We have been extremely honored to have the responsibility of shepherding the journal through these past three years, which included navigating the journal through the upheaval—academic and personal—caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. We would like to thank all the authors and peer reviewers we have worked with since we took over the journal in February 2020. Not only has their work—selfless and, in the case of the reviewers specifically, mostly hidden—helped the journal thrive under the circumstances, it has also helped us personally grow as scholars. We also want to thank the tireless staff at the University of Wisconsin Press—especially Toni Gunnison, Chloe Lauer, Erica Teal, and Claire Eder (now of the University of Kentucky Press)—for their commitment to the journal as well as Ama Derban, who has copy-edited each of the volumes during our tenure. Finally, we have the pleasure of turning the journal over to the skilled hands of Nana Yaw Boampong Sapong and Victoria Smith.

As seems to be tradition with an editorial team’s final volume, the 25th volume of Ghana Studies is a particularly large one. It begins with three research articles. The first of which is a comparative reflection by Carola Lentz on the dances performed at two separate Ghanaian independence-day celebrations, one in 2014 and another marking the festivities surrounding Ghana’s sixtieth anniversary in 2017. Key to Lentz’s analysis is an interrogation of how questions of ethnic difference are articulated in these performances. Following Lentz’s piece is an article by Emmanuella Amoh intertwining an intellectual genealogy of the concept of the African Personality with the institutional history of the Nkrumah-era Ghana Broadcasting Corporation Television (GBC-TV) under the leadership of Shirley Graham Du Bois. For Amoh, the GBC offered a pathway for both Ghanaians and diasporic Africans to explore and experiment with the everyday meanings of the African Personality in a decolonizing world. Delali Amuzu provides the volume’s final stand-alone article. Here, Amuzu returns readers to the Nigerian sociologist Peter Ekeh’s 1975 concept of the “two publics,” which provides a prism through which Amuzu critiques the state of Ghanaian higher education.

Ghana Studies’ 25th volume also includes a special issue co-edited by Raymond Silverman and Allison Martino on Ghanaian visual cultures. Organized to honor the memories of painter and art historian Atta Kwami and art historian Doran Ross, this special issue brings together fifteen pieces reflecting on the past, present, and possible futures of Ghanaian visual culture. Included are interviews with prominent figures in the Ghanaian art scene such as Gilbert Amegatcher and kąrî’kạchä seid’ou; meditations on everything from architecture to film to popular media to fashion; historiographical reflections; and exhibition reviews.

The volume then concludes with Bianca Murillo’s review of Alice Wiemers’s 2021 book Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth- Century Ghana.