General Introduction: “40 Years of Ghana-Korea Relations”

Abstract

Africa-Asia relations entered upon a particularly feisty and crucial phase in the last two decades of the twentieth century; this process continues apace in this century. As Amoah (2016) has argued, it is important not to be seduced by the turbo-charged quality of contemporary Africa-Asia relations and thereby for- get the long provenance of this interaction. To be sure, it is only recently that vigorous academic studies of the varied historical and contemporary links be- tween Africa and Asia has taken of. This new research interest has been driven in the main by China’s meteoric economic rise and its designs in Africa which have become a virtual cottage research industry (Ampiah and Naidu, 2008; Brautigam, 2011; Edoho, 2011; Monson, 2009; Prah and Gumede, 2018; Bodomo, 2013). A positive spin-of of this is the emergence of research centres in African academies (Amoah, 2015) dedicated to the study of the political-economy of Asia as well as and crucially “its … art, language, literature, history, philoso- phy, religion, etc.” (Amoah, 2015, 38). The Centre for Asian Studies () at the University of Ghana, Legon, is one of such centres