MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In this presentation, I explore how meaning-making activities can contribute to cultivating a decolonial consciousness in Ghana. Specifically, it examines how Ghanaian hiplife/hiphop artists have indigenized U.S. African American hiphop for the unfinished project of African decoloniality. To that end, the submission focuses on how three artists, Akan, Wanlov the Kubolor and Ayat, engage with decolonial aesthesis, that is any activity aimed at undoing the colonial sensibilities imposed on the colonized. In addressing these concerns, this study draws on formal interviews, and participant observations at concerts, listening parties and music video shoots; recorded images and videos; and media interviews. Three main things alert me to the way artists consciously claim their Ghanaianess—and hence their blackness— and how that impacts their music making in general. First, they adopt new performance names; second, they resort to using their own language and accents; and lastly they reconfigure their presentation of self. All of these elements are channeled through their performance persona. As it were, they become new beings reflecting a shift in their consciousness about themselves and their society. To this end, these artists are engaged in what I call a decolonial praxis of reclaiming space (physically, emotionally, psychically etc.) to imagine alternative futures beyond coloniality. In turn, they cultivate new identities which expands the realm of possibilities. It is within this space of possibilities that decolonial sensibilities can be engendered.