“What's Love” in an Interconnected World? Ghanaian Market Literature for Youth Responds1

Abstract

This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as “social `shifters'” and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the “interconnectedness” of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing “domesticated” forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of “straddling”, this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

2000s: Expansion and change

“…A few years later, Grace Musila performed a nuanced and imaginative reading of the epistemological disarticulation between British and Kenyan discourses surrounding the much-publicized death of British wildlife photographer Julie Ward in a Kenyan game park in the 1980s (Musila, 2008). In the third issue of 2008, Esther de Bruijn read the trope of heterosexual love in Ghanaian fiction for young adults by authors such as Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay as an articulation of new forms of local agency (De Bruijn, 2008). Esther de Bruijn's article carries over from earlier Africa-related debates -most notably, Stephanie Newell's important 2000 monograph on popular Ghanaian fiction -an understanding of popular literature as clearly distinct from "official" literary texts and genres.…”