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". . . succeeds in conveying the exciting and fascinating characterof the concert party genre, as well as showing clearly how this material can beused to rethink a number of contemporary theoretical themes and issues." -- Karin Barber

Drawing on her participation as an actress in concert party performances, oralhistories ofperformers, and archival research, Catherine M. Cole traces thehistory and development of Ghana's concert party tradition.Cole shows howconcert parties combined an eclectic array of cultural influences, adaptingcharacters and songs from American movies, popular British ballads, and localstorytelling traditions into a spirited blend of comedy and social commentary.

A companion video, Stageshakers!, by Nathan Kwame Braun, brings the concertparty to life for English-speaking audiences. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Wait, there's more!A Video!
Stage-Shakers! Ghana's Concert Party Theatre
by Kwame Braun

A lively video documentary that brings Ghana's concert party theatre to life.

Indiana University Press

For the first time, Western audiences have access to the power and intensity of Ghana's remarkable concert party theatre through Kwame Braun's 100-minute documentary video. Stage-Shakers! brings its festive atmosphere to life by showing backstage preparation - touring, making-up, and practicing - as well as live performance footage. Interviews with key performers, both pioneers and current practitioners, reveal the concert party as a dynamic form of entertainment that is in step with popular fashion, music, song, dance, and social issues. Researched and filmed in collaboration with Catherine M. Cole, this video companion is an important extension of her book, Ghana's Concert Party Theatre.

Nothing short of superb
Cole's study of concert party, a traveling musical theater in Ghana, is nothing short of superb. Not only does she manage to show the history of these itinerant performers and the world they made and remade with every performance, but she uses her analysis of concert party as a way to talk about and problematize the theories and obsessions of our time that sometimes have overdetermined analyses of things African. That concert party performers imitated women, or wore blackface, all complicate our own academic ideas about the performance of gender, or of race, and how those might be different in Africa than in the US or Latin America. Cole's manuscript gives us a history of an African musical form in more detail than anything we have had before, and in so doing she gives us a history of class and culture in Ghana that I think will make a strong impact on African history. But it also challenges scholars to think anew about how to understand and interpret African cultural forms, and shows how limiting it is­for Africans and for academics­ to pidgeon-hole those cultural expressions into examples of buzz words and jargon. This is a book that doesn't just interrogate culture and pronounce it complicated. This is a book that looks the complications firmly in the eye and encourages them to stare right back­.Cole animates the complexities and contradictions of popular African culture to make us think more seriously, more carefully, about how race and gender take on meanings and shed connotations in societies increasingly aware of their place in the world. ... Read more

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Asante Catholicism focuses on the interaction between post-conciliarRoman Catholicism and Asante religion of Ghana, with its implications forself-definition and cultural renewal. It begins by exploring Asante culturalhistory, and depicting how their religo-political institutions were affectedduring contact with European traders, missionaries, and colonial authorities.It further highlights the mutual shaping between Catholicism and theindigenous Asante worldview. The fusion between Christianity and Asante wayscreates conflict, innovation, and modification as the Church reinterpretsChristian values and figures along Asante notions. For example, Jesus Christis reconfigured as kurotwiamansa (leopard).Sections on the interface between Catholic beliefs and Asante socio-politicalinstitutions are particularly important for missiologists.Finally, the book discusses religious vocabulary, spirituality, theology, andthe role of community during social and religious change. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Journal of Mental Health Counseling, published by American Mental Health Counselors Association on April 1, 2005. The length of the article is 4597 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Talking to the Master: intersections of religion, culture, and counseling in Taiwan and Ghana.
Author: Hsiao-Wen Lo
Publication: Journal of Mental Health Counseling (Refereed)
Date: April 1, 2005
Publisher: American Mental Health Counselors Association
Volume: 27Issue: 2Page: 117(12)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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Born on a Monday is a book of photographs from Woe, a village in Ghana. This book is the final product of a six-month volunteer trip to Ghana with the organization Cross Cultural Solutions. The photos document daily life in Woe covering economic activities, religion, and the schools. It includes essays from Ghanaians and observations from Carrie Brown. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Beautiful Photography and a Moving Portrail
Born on a Monday is a book of photographs from Woe, a village in Ghana. This book is the final product of a six-month volunteer trip to Ghana with the organization Cross Cultural Solutions. The photos document daily life in Woe covering economic activities, religion, and the schools. It includes essays from Ghanaians and observations from Carrie Brown.

Both breathtaking and informative. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 2400 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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In 1957 Ghana became one of the first sub-Saharan African nations to gain independence from colonial rule. Over the next decade, hundreds of African Americans--including Martin Luther King Jr., George Padmore, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Richard Wright, Pauli Murray, and Muhammed Ali--visited or settled in Ghana. Kevin K. Gaines explains what attracted these expatriates to Ghana and how their new community was shaped by the convergence of the Cold War, the rise of the U.S. civil rights movement, and the decolonization of Africa.

Posing a direct challenge to U.S. hegemony, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's president, promoted a vision of African liberation, continental unity, and West Indian federation. Although the number of African American expatriates in Ghana was small, in espousing a transnational American citizenship defined by solidarities with African peoples, these activists waged along with their allies in the United States a fundamental, if largely forgotten, struggle over the meaning and content of the formal American citizenship conferred on African Americans by civil rights reform legislation. ... Read more