Oxford Street, Accra

Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing, Calibrations: Reading for the Social, and Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, as well as editor of the two-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, coeditor of A Companion to Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and General Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.

• Preface ix Introduction. Urban Theory and Performative Streetscapes 1 Part I. Horizontal Archaeologies 1. Ga Akutso Formation and the Question of Hybridity: The Afro-Brazilians (Tabon) of Accra 37 2. The Spatial Fix: Colonial Administration, Disaster Management, and Land-Use Distribution in Early Twentieth-Century Accra 64 3. Osu borla no, sardine chensii soo: Danes, Euro-Africans, and the Transculturation of Osu 98 Part II. Morphologies of Everyday Life 4. "The Beautyful Ones": Tro-tro Slogans, Cell Phone Advertising, and the Hallelujah Chorus 129 5. "Este loco, loco": Transnationalism and the Shaping of Accra's Salsa Scene 159 6. Pumping Irony: Gymming, the Kobolo, and the Cultural Economy of Free Time 183 7. The Lettered City: Literary Representations of Accra 213 Conclusion. On Urban Free Time: Vladimir, Estragon, and Rem Koolhaas 239 Appendix. Tro-tro Inscriptions 251 Notes 255 References 279 Index 293

“What can a street teach us? In Oxford Street, Accra, Ato Quayson helps us go beyond the superficial spatial cues of this seemingly typical urban African street. He investigates the people and their interactions, in the past and present, and how these cumulatively create a sense of place. It’s an anthropological framework for examining Accra from the ground up: not its concrete structures, but its migrations – of Ga, Osu, Afro-Brazilian, Danish and Lebanese, and today’s traffic of Ghanaians and expats – and the social, economic and political forces that make the Osu neighborhood.” - Victoria Okoye (The Guardian) "An excellent introduction to the city. It takes the reader on a journey through Accra’s history, showing its evolution from a fishing village to a port town during British colonial rule, to a vibrant metropolis that draws in people from around the country and the world. With Oxford Street, a bustling commercial corridor, as a starting point, Quayson evokes the sights and sounds of the city with keen attention to how people interact with each other and their surroundings. Forays into the salsa and gym scenes underline the transnational dimensions of life in Accra." - Peace Adzo Medie (New York Times) “Oxford Street is an erudite and extraordinary book. After reading it, I was amazed by how much a street can teach and inspire. I would recommend this book to geographers, anthropologists, and to anyone who is interested in African culture and transnationalism. Easy to read and compelling in many parts, the book is an excellent companion for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and it makes for an interesting read for any transnational scholar.” - Zhuyun Amy Zang (Society & Space) “Oxford Street, Accra is a magnificent book for all ‘students’ interested in a nuanced cultural and economic analysis of global urban studies. … By reading this book I realized that Quayson is many things together: he is a historian and an ethnographer, a structuralist and a post-structuralist, a political economist and a culturalist, a phenomenologist and a distant observer. Maybe it is because he has so many perspectives that this book can be deemed as important; maybe these are some of Quayson’s own expressive fragments.” - George Mavrommatis (Postcolonial Studies) “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.” - Jennifer Anne Hart (International Journal of African Historical Studies) “In this ambitious theoretical and empirical project, noted postcolonial literary scholar Ato Quayson takes Accra’s most prominent commercial district as an entry point into developing a nuanced and diverse historical portrait of the contemporary city. This single-city monograph from Africa is a rare and much-needed addition to the growing body of research on African urbanism. As urban studies increasingly takes its cues from the continent, Oxford Street is an indispensable asset to current debates on history, method, life and policy in the African city.” - James Christopher Mizes (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research) "Quayson has superseded his goal of forestalling a superficial reading of Oxford Street as a mere outpost of globalization by giving readers a deep understanding of the whole of Accra, its history, and its spatial practices." - Adedamola Osinulu (Journal of African History) "Quayson provides a framework for thinking about Accra’s particularities, its infrastructures and historical layerings that order creative ways of life. What is it about Accra that speaks to various people, that creates intimacy and makes people feel that Accra is theirs? The city has a feeling of closeness: small personal spaces rapidly open into broader senses of past and feelings of futurity. Quayson stands still, paying attention." - Jesse Weaver Shipley (PMLA) "Quayson is a compelling writer, and the chapters effortlessly oscillate between local and global, past, present and future, which makes for a richly detailed story. This book is a must-read for people interested in African history, urban studies, transnationalism and the city of Accra." - Geertrui Vannoppen (Africa) "[T]he book is significant contribution to post-colonial spatial and urban theory, contemporary examples of local communities interacting with global trends, and complex historical perspectives that push our understanding beyond colonialism as the only frame on modern-day Accra. Moreover, it provides all ethnographers with a fine and well-written example of how to narrate daily life and balance description with the historical and theoretical material." - David Alexander Brown (Anthropological Notebooks) “[A] work inspired by more than a decade of research by Professor Ato Quayson into the cultural shifts and influences that inform the bustling, vibrant commercial corridor known as Oxford Street in Accra’s Osu district….Quayson traces oral histories, shares pieces of colonial correspondence and recounts conversations with urban denizens on their salsa and gymming hobbies. Even the pithy tro tro and billboard slogans aren’t missed in his analysis, which invites the reader to engage with the ongoing discourse on Accra’s urban street life.” - Victoria Okoye (UrbanAfrica.net)