Browsing by Author "Amo-Agyemang, C."

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Decolonising the Discourse on Resilience
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Amo-Agyemang, C.
This article presents a discursive critique of the Eurocentric paradigms of knowledge production that characterise much of the underlying logics in the age of neoliberal discourses on resilience, pointing out important areas not given sufficient attention. In particular, it highlights the limits of the modernist ontology of resilience, whereby extremely “vulnerable” African communities are encouraged “to become resilient” to climatic disruption and environmental catastrophe and to “bounce back” as rapidly as possible. The article moves the discussion forward, drawing from critical decolonial approaches, in alignment with Indigenous knowledges, to question and rethink meaningful alternative ontologies, ways of knowing and being, in adaptive governance. I argue that the recognition of the plurality of many worlds, rather than one world, highlighted through critical decolonial understandings of epistemic forms with Indigenous knowledges, can be counterposed to Western universality as an innovative ontology to decentre the world order in the problematic dominant development of resilience thinking.
Ghana’s demand for restitution of material artifacts: a decolonial reflection
(African Identiries, 2024) Amo-Agyemang, C.
This paper incisively engages with the ways in which African leaders are not assertively demanding restitution of their material artifacts dispossessed in the eras of enslavement and colonization. It ques tions indigenous people’s struggles for restitution of materialities colonially dispossessed beyond a simplistic view of decentering their hierarchy and ownership. Besides, the paper critically inter rogates why Euro-America scholarship generously offers resilience discourse as perhaps the most important conceptual addition to international policy making in the last few decades to Africa, but it ironically does not care to restitute dispossessed material artifacts back to indigenous African peoples. The paper argues that colonial dispossession is about recentering indigenous people as masters and owners of material artifacts via restitution. Using coloniality of dispossession/theft this paper proposes a framework of restitution that aims to address resilient colonial dispossession enacted by the West. It is pointed out that decolonization will be achievable through restitution of indigenous material artifacts. I engage in the topic of restitution of material artifacts, particularly in the con text of Asante people of Ghana. The paper contends that restitution of dispossessed material artifacts would empower indigenous peo ples in Africa and strategically position them in global geopolitics
The role of the state in Sino-Ghanaian relations: The case of Bui hydroelectric dam
(Taylor & Francis Group, 2021) Amo-Agyemang, C.
This article critically examines the dominant role of the state at the level of institutions and policies with China to leverage and shape the developmental out comes of the current relationship. The new win–win relationship has sparked intense debates, which have attracted the reflections of academics and policy makers and Sino-Africa relations in recent decades. Firstly, that China’s African intervention serves as a catalyst for the continent’s transformation and hence provides the continent opportunity for self-determination. Secondly, that China’s increasing presence in Africa is self-centred due to excessive focus on resource extraction and market expansion, reminiscent of neo-colonial strategies and less developmental. The paper argues that these simplistic narratives produce a discourse that overly amplify China’s actions and rarely analyse how African states can harness the opportunities the relationship entails. It focuses on how to rescue the relationship from being supposed to be one way street and provides a framework for evaluating the outcomes of the relationship based on African state interventions. The article deploys Ghana’s Bui hydroelectric dam heuristically as a soft power instrument in an attempt to explicate poor Ghanaian state institutional capacity and the weaknesses of its actors in their interactions with Chinese players thus far in building the developmental capacity to sustain economic progress.
Toward cultural narratology: Indigenous Frafra and Akan perspectives on resilience
(Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2023) Amo-Agyemang, C.
There is a distinct conceptualization of the problematic of resilience emerging from cultural narratives and ontologies/epistemologies in considering the possibility of surviving in our precarious present and uncertain futures. This article engages with the distinct narratives of Frafra and Akan Indigenous people for whom the narrative of storytelling is consciously and explicitly at the center of their culture-specific processes of resilience, including those deriving from building climate resilience and environmental adaptation. This article probes the important implications that a better understanding of narratives of resilience may have for the possibility of surviving in our precarious present and uncertain futures. It is suggested that Indigenous narratives of resilience, such as those represented in active Frafra and Akan traditions and ontologies/epistemologies highlight the relevance of bearing in mind cultural specificity for advancing the theorizing on resilience, and what thinking with, and through hegemonic resilience paradigms may entail. I conclude by making a strong case for the potential of cultural narratives to subvert and problematize resilience to reimagine alternative resilient ways of being and knowing in the world, while also touching upon some implications for inter-disciplinarity, trans-disciplinarity, and multi-disciplinarity.
Valorising University Education in Ghana
(International Journal of African Renaissance Studies - Multi-, Inter- and Transdisciplinarity, 2019) Amo-Agyemang, C.
There has been a neoliberal re-ordering of the political intent behind education in Ghana. Prior to the said re-ordering, education was a means by which the government facilitated the citizen’s acquisition of the social capital required to enable the individual to contribute to the positive development of the state. The state intervened to create a common sense of nationhood and destiny among the citizenry in the quest for national reconstruction. However, the neoliberal “commodification” of education—in the form of a philosophical readjustment of the need for education, from being a “right” to a “privilege”—and its attendant shifting of the cost onto the citizen, have led to the creation of segregation based on income. The poor have thus been permanently locked out of education as a means of upward social mobility. The result of this is socio economic disharmony, with the educational system as a political filter which separates those who can afford education and those who cannot. This has negative implications for the process of democratic deepening: the educationally empowered will lord it over the educationally disempowered. Stretched to its logical conclusion, the state, even though liberal, becomes an oppressive democratic state, with structurally limited options for the poor.