Transnational circulation and digital fatigue in Ghana's Azonto dance craze

Abstract

Azonto is a Ghanaian urban dance craze whose popularity is built through its global circulation. I trace its production and flow across studios, radio stations, dance floors, and digital platforms in Accra and among Ghanaians in London and New York. I argue that, as a technologically mediated style, Azonto is the embodiment of being Ghanaian in a mobile, digital world. This dance reveals both the potentials and the hazards of digital repetition and copying for self‐recognition. Ghanaian musicians and fans creatively use the repetitive aspects of digital technologies, making this dance a style of symbolic appropriation that links Ghanaian youth both in Accra and abroad into a dispersed community of musical participation that valorizes mobility itself. The dance's sudden ubiquity, however, creates “digital fatigue,” an uncertainty among participants about belonging in an era of digital replication that threatens to unmoor signs of recognition from the cultural registers that empower them in the first place.

A “Scented Declaration of Progress”: Globalisation, Afropolitan Imagineering and Familiar Orientations

“…Jesse Shipley's () example of Azonto and Kristy Leissle's () cosmopolitan cocoa farmers illustrate the form of Afropolitan(ism) that Adeniyi Ogunyankin promotes. Shipley points out that the Azonto song and dance “creates a cosmopolitan style that transcends local–global opposition and maintains its distinct Ghanaianness as a form of worldliness” (2013:368).…”

Africa’s Legends: digital technologies, aesthetics and middle-class aspirations in Ghanaian games and comics

“…In recent years, many scholars have zoomed in on the role of technologies and the importance of style in the production and circulation of media in Africa (Larkin 2008;De Witte and Meyer 2012;Shipley 2013). According to Larkin (2008), we need to be cautious about the all-too-familiar narratives of technological 'revolution' and 'development', as media technologies do not always work in the way that they are intended to do.…”

“…Particularly, African heritage is being refashioned into styles and brands that are circulating amongst young middle-class Africans (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009;De Witte and Meyer 2012, 52, 60;Shipley 2013). De Witte and Meyer argue that these new mediatized forms of heritage fit well into the identities and globalized consumer lifestyles of younger generations (2012,60).…”

“…De Witte and Meyer argue that these new mediatized forms of heritage fit well into the identities and globalized consumer lifestyles of younger generations (2012,60). According to Shipley (2013) digital technologies and digital media contribute to the popularity and circulation of these products as they facilitate production and distribution, allowing for their consumption and appropriation in various contexts. Beside the refashioning and circulation of popular forms of African history and culture, we would like to pay attention to their production and how that mediates particular aspirations and aesthetics.…”

The Year 2013 in Sociocultural Anthropology: Cultures of Circulation and Anthropological Facts

“…The financial industry used cell phones to sell products in previously inaccessible areas of the developed world, revealing how technical and social infrastructures are intertwined (Maurer et al ). Musicians and fans from multiple continents used “software, airwaves, Internet, mobile phones, videos, rumor, [and] dance” to create a globally circulating Ghanaian dance craze (Shipley :377). By contrast, in Lisbon, Portugal, recent African migrants from Guinea‐Bissau used cell phones not to retrain transnational ties to Africa but, rather, as a means of constructing an African migrant community in Portugal (M. Johnson ).…”