Parody after identity: Digital music and the politics of uncertainty in West Africa

Abstract

The FOKN Bois are an irreverent, cosmopolitan hip‐hop duo from Ghana. They came to fame as part of the digital‐music boom centered in Nigeria that has dominated African popular culture since the mid‐2000s. Their most popular track, “Thank God We're Not a Nigerians,” mocks the national rivalry between Ghana and Nigeria and the idea of national allegiance itself. The song's production and circulation reveal that digital parody is increasingly central to how a rising generation of urban Africans live. Through sounds and images circulating on social media, young cosmopolitan Africans rely on a smartphone‐driven social media–scape to reimagine national territorial identity in virtual terms. The FOKN Bois’ work shows that uncertainty and contradiction can be modes of knowing.

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

“…In an essay that considers the ambivalent work of images of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Rebecca Stein () theorizes as “lapses” the ways in which visual technologies failed; she suggests that “the ethnography of lapse might provide a means of figuring colonial breakdown” (S64). Like ambivalence, parody and humor—and how they circulate—offer critical and productive points of entry into issues of mobility, marginality, and state power (Amrute ; Shipley ; Stankiewicz ; Yeh ; see also a special issue of Public Culture on comedy, edited by Berlant and Ngai ). Jesse Weaver Shipley () writes about diasporic Ghanaian musicians in London who parody national rivalries between Ghana and Nigeria, and in so doing undermine some of the power of past conflict to shape the present.…”

“…Like ambivalence, parody and humor—and how they circulate—offer critical and productive points of entry into issues of mobility, marginality, and state power (Amrute ; Shipley ; Stankiewicz ; Yeh ; see also a special issue of Public Culture on comedy, edited by Berlant and Ngai ). Jesse Weaver Shipley () writes about diasporic Ghanaian musicians in London who parody national rivalries between Ghana and Nigeria, and in so doing undermine some of the power of past conflict to shape the present. Damien Stankiewicz () shows how stereotypical jokes about each other's German, French, and other nationalities told among staff at a television channel with a mandate to foster pan‐European understanding and identity illustrate the compatibility of supposedly disparate ideologies like nationalism and cosmopolitanism.…”

On Cynicism: Activist and Artistic Responses to Corruption in Ghana

“…Instead, they saw their work as a necessary response to corruption, one that challenged the ruling elite and provided inspiration for other forms of activism. Having gained social notoriety and value in contemporary Ghana through the circulation of images, texts, and music, as well as through the concomitant production of moral commentaries (Shipley 2017), they are thus comparable to the trickster Ananse. Their approach is reminiscent of the Ghanaian concert‐party theater performances of the twentieth century, which formed part of a wider history of transatlantic performances aimed at dramatizing the frustrations of the underprivileged classes while providing a unique perspective on colonialism and nationalist identity (Cole 2001; Shipley 2004).…”

“…In the essay's second section, I discuss the work of Ghanaian artists hailing from the emergent urban intermediate class, people less concerned with expected political change than with making fun of the present through satire and humor (Boyer 2013; Haugerud 2013; Molé 2013; Dağtas 2016; Shipley 2017). Rather than engaging with “good governance” and “anticorruption” discourses, Ghanaian artists used popular culture to critique elite forms of knowledge by evoking “the presence of ‘us, the poor’ in contrast to ‘them, the rich and powerful‘” (Barber 2018, 7–12).…”

Keywords and key words in AE

“…For instance, in 2016, authors used care (6) to index varying topics, from rituals of elderly care in Thailand (Aulino ), to kinship ideology in domestic violence counseling in India (Kowalski ), to sex work in Japan (G. Koch ), although with labor and precarity among its keywords, the latter article does fit the economy and neoliberalism cluster. Likewise, media (7 in 2016; 4 in 2017) refers to mass media as well as digital and popular media in very different contexts, indexing topics that may or may not fit the main themes (Ball and Nozawa ; Dent ; Fisher ; Gray ; Holmes 2016; Jusionyte ; N. Evans ; Shipley ; Stankiewicz ). Other frequently recurring words in 2016 include ethnography (6), food (5), gender (5), kinship (5), performance (5), violence (5), anthropology (4), love (4), and NGOs (4); of these, only gender reappears in each of the Table columns for the following three years, but it is surpassed by anthropology in the final count shown in Table , discussed below.…”