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Oxford Street, Accra: Rethinking the Roots of Cosmopolitanism from an Africanist Historian's Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Carina Ray
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Extract

I first encountered ato quayson's transcendent account of accra and its enigmatic oxford street in 2009, a full five years before it was published as a book. In August of that year the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) held its fifth biennial conference in the Ghanaian capital. This was ASWAD's first conference on the continent, and it drew an impressive array of scholars from all over the world to a country that has long been a focal point of the diaspora's engagement with its African past and present. Because of its location, the conference attracted an especially large contingent of scholars who work on Ghana, among them quite a few historians, including me. Just when it seemed that the atmosphere of intellectual exchange could not get any headier, Quayson invited a small group of us to join him on a bespoke tour of Accra that heralded the arrival of Oxford Street in 2014.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 505 - 514
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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