Routes of Remembrance
Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana
Holsey, Bayo
Paperback
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BOOK SYNOPSIS
Over the past fifteen years, visitors from the African diaspora have flocked to Cape Coast and Elmina, two towns in Ghana whose chief tourist attractions are the castles and dungeons where slaves were imprisoned before embarking for the New World. This desire to commemorate the Middle Passage contrasts sharply with the silence that normally cloaks the subject within Ghana. Why do Ghanaians suppress the history of enslavement? And why is this history expressed so differently on the other side of the Atlantic?
Routes of Remembrance tackles these questions by analyzing the slave trades absence from public versions of coastal Ghanaian family and community histories, its troubled presentation in the countrys classrooms and nationalist narratives, and its elaboration by the transnational tourism industry. Bayo Holsey discovers that in the past, African involvement in the slave trade was used by Europeans to denigrate local residents, and this stigma continues to shape the way Ghanaians imagine their historical past. Today, however, due to international attention and the curiosity of young Ghanaians, the slave trade has at last entered the public sphere, transforming it from a stigmatizing history to one that holds the potential to contest global inequalities.
Holseys study will be crucial to anyone involved in the global debate over how the slave trade endures in history and in memory.
BOOK REVIEWS
“I thoroughly enjoyed reading this fascinating book. Indeed, it is rare to find such a sensitive account of how people deal with painful memories of the past and the complex social forces that dictate the shape and form that those memories of the past take.”—Jennifer Cole, University of Chicago
Submit a book reviewFOR RELATED BOOKS
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0226349764
ISBN(13-digit): 9780226349763
Dewey Decimal: 306.3/6209667
Library of Congress: 2007038227
Book Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 280
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