Transnational Impulses in Some Recent Ghanaian Works of Prose

Abstract

This paper reviews two contemporary Ghanaian prose works in the light of emerging scholarly discourses about transnational cultural traffic especially as they relate to Africa and its Diasporas. The paper argues that while most classifications and studies of Ghanaian prose literature—and indeed other genres— have been framed by narrowly conceived nationalist viewpoints inherited from the mandates of European colonialism, contemporary Ghanaian novels actually embrace a wider conception of nation that invokes spaces and bodies in both Ghanaian/African homeland and the Diaspora. The paper uses AyiKweiArmah’s Osiris Rising and Kofi Awoonor’s Comes the Voyager at Last to demonstrate how this broader conception of (trans)-national space and notions of belonging in Ghanaian prose works refocuses our attentions on literary imaginaries that paradoxically transgress the borders of Ghana in order to deepen our understandings of the fuller reaches of Ghanaianness.