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Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism

2015; Boston University; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2326-3016

Jennifer Hart,

African history and culture studies

Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism. By Ato Quayson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 297. $25.95.In Oxford Street, Accra, Ato Quayson seeks to capture and explore the multilayered, improvisational fragment of Ghana's capital through an investigation of within and alongside its busiest street. Quayson argues that the history of Oxford Street-a small section of road that constitutes an important commercial district in Accra-is connected to both the consequences of twentieth-century urban planning and the processes of transnationalism and globalization. In doing so he lays the groundwork for a renewed conversation about the history and culture of urban Africa that engages critically with urban theory in Africa and around the world through detailed analyses informed by ethnographic and historical research.The book is divided into two major sections. Borrowing from Foucault, Quayson's Horizontal Archaeologies (Part 1) trace the development of urban culture in Accra through the first half of the twentieth century. Through chapters on the role of the AfroBrazilian Tabon in shaping early Ga urban character, the colonial state's attempts to dictate land use patterns and practices in order to more efficiently plan the city, and the centrality of Euro-Africans in the emergence of an urban culture in Accra, Quayson argues that Accra's transnationalism was not a recent phenomenon attributed to the globalization of the neoliberal age. Rather, it was embedded in the very processes of urbanization and identity formation among the city's residents since at least the nineteenth century. In Part 2 (The Morphologies of Everyday Life), Quayson explores these historical themes through practices of the everyday in contemporary Accra-signage, salsa, and gymming-tracing the ways in which contemporary attempts to craft and assert transnational identities and participate in globalized cultures of consumption are rooted in historical debates about hybridity and social inclusion.Oxford Street is an important book that will provide a critical point of reference for anyone writing about urban Africa, joining AbdouMaliq Simone's For the City Yet to Come (Duke University Press, 2004) as a seminal text in critical urban studies. Quayson extends Simone's analysis of city life and argues for a theoretical model that grows out of concrete historical and contemporary examples. Rather than a narrow book on a small stretch of road in Accra, Quayson attempts to claim more for his analysis, extending his observations to the whole of Accra, or as his conclusion seems to indicate with its extensive discussion of Lagos, to the whole of Africa. …