Abstract:
This paper reviews contemporary Ghanaian poetry in the light of
emerging scholarly discourses about transnational cultural traffic,
especially as they relate to Africa and its post-slavery Diasporas in the
Western world. The paper argues that while most studies of Ghanaian
poetry have been framed by narrowly conceived nationalist viewpoints
related to the limiting and inherited mandates of European colonialism,
contemporary Ghanaian poetry actually embraces a wider conception
of nation that invokes spaces and bodies in both the Ghanaian/African
homeland and the Diaspora. The paper argues that nation-language,
for Ghanaian poets as much as it was for Kamau Brathwaite and others
in the African Diaspora, rests on a foundation of multiple memories
and historical experiences drawn from the spaces of both the African
continent and its Diasporas, and that is precisely why the imagination
of nation in Ghanaian poetry paradoxically transgresses the borders of
Ghana and logically leads to transnational transactions.
