What is to be remembered?: Tourism to Ghana's slave castle-dungeons

Theatre Journal

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 617-637

  Richards, Sandra L ^a  

^a NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38649134273     PISSN: 01922882     EISSN: 1086332X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2006.0044     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. See Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1989);
2. Iyunola Osagie, "Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness," Massachusetts Review 38, no. 1 (1997): 63-83.
3. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.
4. Dennis Kennedy, "Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism," Theatre Journal 50.2 (1998): 175-88.
5. Bemetta Hayes, "Claiming Our Heritage is a Booming Industry," American Visions (1997): 44.
6. Chris Abotchie, "International Tourism in Ghana: Socio-Cultural Impacts," Legon Journal of the Humanities 9 (1996): 1-29;
7. Joseph Akyeampong, "An Overview of Ghana's Tourism Industry," Business Watch, February-March 1999: 51-52.
8. Arjun Appadural, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minnesota University Press, 1996), 42;
9. Susan Willis, "Memory and Mass Culture," in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O'Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 178-87,
10. Edward M. Bruner, "Tourism in the Balinese Borderzone," in Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, ed. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 160. What makes this assertion all the more puzzling is that Bruner writes with a good deal of insight about the castles of Ghana.
11. Deborah Barfield, "Trip to the Motherland Is Painful, Educational," Florida Today 26 July 1998: F1.
12. Albert van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana (Accra: Sedco Publishing Limited, 1980), i.
13. van Dantzig, Forts and Castles of Ghana, ix;
14. Information on relationships between castle occupants and townspeople is limited; see A. W. Lawrence, Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963);
15. Theresa A. Singleton, "The Slave Trade Remembered on the Former Gold and Slave Coasts," Slavery and Abolition 20.1 (1999): 150-69.
16. Interestingly, most African American travel accounts omit any reference to the officers' quarters and public spaces; it's as though these above-ground areas at Elmina or Cape Coast castle made no impact on the authors' memories. See, for example, Opal Palmer Adisa, "Accra Drums Me Home," in Go Girl! The Black Woman's Book of Travel and Adventure, ed. Elaine Lee (Portland: Eighth Mountain Press, 1997), 53-60;
17. Daniel Jerome Wideman, "Singing Sankofa," in Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, ed. Kevin Young (New York: Perennial, 2000), 298-307.
18. Vivian M. Patraka, "Spectacles of Suffering: Performing Presence, Absence, and Historical Memory at U.S. Holocaust Museum," in Performance and Cultural Politics, ed. Elin Diamond (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 94.
19. Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Fergusen (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 332.
20. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, "Afterlives," Performance Research 2.2 (1999): 1.
21. Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997);
22. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
23. Kwesi Yankah, Speaking for the Chief: The Okyeame and the Politics of Royal Akan Oratory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
24. Marimba Ani, "Remarks" (paper presented at the 3rd Pan African Historical Theatre Festival [PANAFEST '97], Cape Coast, Ghana, 1997).
25. Kreamer, "Contested Terrain," par. 2, 15;
26. Bruner, "Tourism in Ghana," 294.
27. Kofi Anyidoho, "Memory and Vision," in Ancestrallogic & Caribbeanblues (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1993);
28. Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, "Colonial History and the Slave Experience as Themes in Modern African Literature," in Nationalism vs. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English, ed. Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin (Tubingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1996), 219-28.
29. Ama Ata Aidoo, Anowa (London: Longman Drumbeat, 1970);
30. Christina Ama Ata Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost (New York: Collier Books, 1965).
31. Stephen Buckley, "Heritage Battle Rages at Slavery's Sacred Sites," Guardian 11 May 1995, 11. In addition, I remember informal conversations with Jamaican activist and tour leader Pauline Petinaud, aka Miss P, during PANAFEST '97, when she complained that plans to hold a popular music performance at Cape Coast castle amounted to irreverent dancing on ancestors' graves.
32. Stephen Buckley, "U.S., African Blacks Differ on Turning Slave Dungeons into Tourist Attractions," Washington Post 17 April 1995, A10.
33. On this latter point, see Caryl Phillips, The Atlantic Sound (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000).
34. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 192.
35. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2-3.
36. Elli Lester Roushanzamir and Peggy J. Kreshel, "Gloria and Anthony Visit a Plantation: History into Heritage at 'Laura, a Creole Plantation,'" International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration 2, no. 3-4 (2001): 185.
37. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture, 2-3, 17-78.
38. Vera Lawrence Hyatt, "Ghana: The Chronicle of a Museum Development Project in the Central Region" (Washington, D.C.: Office of International Relations, the Smithsonian Institution, 1977), 28.
39. Kreamer, "Contested Terrain," par. 15.
40. Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 18, 107.
41. Christopher Waterman, "'Our Tradition Is a Very Modern Tradition': Popular Music and the Construction of a Pan-Yoruba Identity," Ethnomusicology 34.3 (1990): 367-79.
42. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge University Press, 1978), 54.
43. Edward Cohen, "Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism," Annals of Tourism Research 15 (1988): 371-86.
44. For a representative sample of plays and critical statements, see Biodun Jeyifo, ed., Modern African Drama, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002).
45. Alfred Kofi Quarcoo, The Language of Adinkra Symbols (Legon: Sebewie Ventures Publications, 1994), 17.