Rogers Asempasah
Biographic Data
| ID | 135044 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rogers Asempasah |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rogers |
| FAMILY NAME | Asempasah |
| SIGNATURE | ASEMPASAH R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Coast |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1272-1211 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Terror in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon
What does it mean to read Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1992) as a narrative of terror? Drawing on postcolonial theorizations on terror and Rachel Pain’s notion of ‘geotrauma,’ this paper extends the meaning of terror from the political and legal sphere into the fictional representation of intimate terrorism and trauma in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon. The paper argues that terror and trauma constitute a strategic technique by which Darko de…
Gendering visions of the postcolonial modernist state through names: A literary onomastic analysis of Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird (2009)
Remembering the Disremembered: 9/11 And Traumatic Memory in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s “The Book of Remembered Things
This article reads Abubakar Ibrahim’s short story “The Book of Remembered Things” as an anti-jihadist narrative that meditates on the traumatic effects of violent jihadism on the postcolonial Muslim domestic space and a counternarrative to the dominant body of Western fictional responses to the 9/11 terror attacks. Situated at the intersection of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and postcolonial trauma theory, the article argues that Ibrahim m…
Rethinking Campaign Songs as Strategic Narratives: A Critical Analysis of "Awurade Kasa" and "Wona Mayi Wo" in Elections in Ghana
Strategic narratives have emerged as sites of theoretical reflection and objects of inquiry in war and security studies and in international relations and diplomacy, but their potential to offer a nuanced analysis of campaign songs has been conspicuously absent. Drawing on the theory of strategic narratives and employing a thematic analysis of the texts of "Awurade Kasa" and "Wona Mayi Wo," used by the New Patriotic Party in the 2000 and 2012 ele…
In search of a post-transatlantic slave trade dwelling and conviviality: Rethinking Ghana’s ‘Year of Return’ with Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965)
This paper discusses the ways in which Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) can help us rethink Ghana’s annual ‘Year of Return’ celebrations. Drawing on hooks’ notion of ‘homeplace’, Ahmed’s theorization of ‘strange encounter,’ and Sharpe’s rumination on Black being ‘in the wake’ or afterlife of slavery, this paper reflects on how Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost can help us rethink the ‘Year of Return’ project in terms of dwelling. The pa…
Thinking a Post-coronavirus Africa: Reading Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon in the Era of Covid-19
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed Africa’s precarious position within the global system. Once again, Africa is looking to the West for salvation in the form of vaccines and loans. Beyond the economic crisis, however, perhaps the most telling impact of the pandemic is not death but the shame of being postcolonial — a shame that arises from the painful realization that postcolonial is a condition of dependency. There is therefore a growing a cri…
A postcolonial ecocritical reading of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) and Kwakuvi Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004)
African literature has suffered a great deal of scathing criticism, especially from western critics and scholars, who believe that Black African writers and critics have repeatedly focused on trite themes and subject matters of colonial/postcolonial nature at the expense of the global environmental crises. This paper then, which is partly a response to this criticism, focuses on two novels, namely, Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004) and Gyasi’s Hom…
Unsettling the coloniality of power: Form, grievability, and futurity in Opoku-Agyemang’s Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (1996)
This essay reframes Opoku-Agyemang’s Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (1996) around coloniality of power and Derrida’s ethic of learning to live finally. Focusing on form or rhetorical structure, we argue that Opoku-Agyemang’s poems on Cape Coast Castle and the slave trade suggest that the possibility of grievability and giving voice to the disremembered is contingent on the disavowal of silence and unsettling the coloniality of power of …
Exile and postcolonial national redemption in Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
This paper explores the link between exile and national redemption in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). Although exile constitutes the dominant interpretive concept as it relates to the scandalous and the breaking of a vicious cycle of violence and hopelessness in both novels, the connection between exile and postcolonial national redemption has gone unexplored. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s…
A postcolonial ecocritical reading of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) and Kwakuvi Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004)
African literature has suffered a great deal of scathing criticism, especially from western critics and scholars, who believe that Black African writers and critics have repeatedly focused on trite themes and subject matters of colonial/postcolonial nature at the expense of the global environmental crises. This paper then, which is partly a response to this criticism, focuses on two novels, namely, Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004) and Gyasi’s Hom…
In search of a post-transatlantic slave trade dwelling and conviviality: Rethinking Ghana’s ‘Year of Return’ with Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965)
This paper discusses the ways in which Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) can help us rethink Ghana’s annual ‘Year of Return’ celebrations. Drawing on hooks’ notion of ‘homeplace’, Ahmed’s theorization of ‘strange encounter,’ and Sharpe’s rumination on Black being ‘in the wake’ or afterlife of slavery, this paper reflects on how Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost can help us rethink the ‘Year of Return’ project in terms of dwelling. The pa…
Remembering the Disremembered: 9/11 And Traumatic Memory in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s “The Book of Remembered Things
This article reads Abubakar Ibrahim’s short story “The Book of Remembered Things” as an anti-jihadist narrative that meditates on the traumatic effects of violent jihadism on the postcolonial Muslim domestic space and a counternarrative to the dominant body of Western fictional responses to the 9/11 terror attacks. Situated at the intersection of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and postcolonial trauma theory, the article argues that Ibrahim m…
Exile and postcolonial national redemption in Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
This paper explores the link between exile and national redemption in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). Although exile constitutes the dominant interpretive concept as it relates to the scandalous and the breaking of a vicious cycle of violence and hopelessness in both novels, the connection between exile and postcolonial national redemption has gone unexplored. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s…
Exile and postcolonial national redemption in Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
This paper explores the link between exile and national redemption in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). Although exile constitutes the dominant interpretive concept as it relates to the scandalous and the breaking of a vicious cycle of violence and hopelessness in both novels, the connection between exile and postcolonial national redemption has gone unexplored. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s…
Unsettling the coloniality of power: Form, grievability, and futurity in Opoku-Agyemang’s Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (1996)
This essay reframes Opoku-Agyemang’s Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems (1996) around coloniality of power and Derrida’s ethic of learning to live finally. Focusing on form or rhetorical structure, we argue that Opoku-Agyemang’s poems on Cape Coast Castle and the slave trade suggest that the possibility of grievability and giving voice to the disremembered is contingent on the disavowal of silence and unsettling the coloniality of power of …
Thinking a Post-coronavirus Africa: Reading Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon in the Era of Covid-19
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed Africa’s precarious position within the global system. Once again, Africa is looking to the West for salvation in the form of vaccines and loans. Beyond the economic crisis, however, perhaps the most telling impact of the pandemic is not death but the shame of being postcolonial — a shame that arises from the painful realization that postcolonial is a condition of dependency. There is therefore a growing a cri…
A postcolonial ecocritical reading of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016) and Kwakuvi Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004)
African literature has suffered a great deal of scathing criticism, especially from western critics and scholars, who believe that Black African writers and critics have repeatedly focused on trite themes and subject matters of colonial/postcolonial nature at the expense of the global environmental crises. This paper then, which is partly a response to this criticism, focuses on two novels, namely, Azasu’s The Slave Raiders (2004) and Gyasi’s Hom…
In search of a post-transatlantic slave trade dwelling and conviviality: Rethinking Ghana’s ‘Year of Return’ with Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965)
This paper discusses the ways in which Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) can help us rethink Ghana’s annual ‘Year of Return’ celebrations. Drawing on hooks’ notion of ‘homeplace’, Ahmed’s theorization of ‘strange encounter,’ and Sharpe’s rumination on Black being ‘in the wake’ or afterlife of slavery, this paper reflects on how Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost can help us rethink the ‘Year of Return’ project in terms of dwelling. The pa…
Gendering visions of the postcolonial modernist state through names: A literary onomastic analysis of Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s Tail of the Blue Bird (2009)
Remembering the Disremembered: 9/11 And Traumatic Memory in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s “The Book of Remembered Things
This article reads Abubakar Ibrahim’s short story “The Book of Remembered Things” as an anti-jihadist narrative that meditates on the traumatic effects of violent jihadism on the postcolonial Muslim domestic space and a counternarrative to the dominant body of Western fictional responses to the 9/11 terror attacks. Situated at the intersection of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and postcolonial trauma theory, the article argues that Ibrahim m…
Rethinking Campaign Songs as Strategic Narratives: A Critical Analysis of "Awurade Kasa" and "Wona Mayi Wo" in Elections in Ghana
Strategic narratives have emerged as sites of theoretical reflection and objects of inquiry in war and security studies and in international relations and diplomacy, but their potential to offer a nuanced analysis of campaign songs has been conspicuously absent. Drawing on the theory of strategic narratives and employing a thematic analysis of the texts of "Awurade Kasa" and "Wona Mayi Wo," used by the New Patriotic Party in the 2000 and 2012 ele…
Terror in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon
What does it mean to read Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1992) as a narrative of terror? Drawing on postcolonial theorizations on terror and Rachel Pain’s notion of ‘geotrauma,’ this paper extends the meaning of terror from the political and legal sphere into the fictional representation of intimate terrorism and trauma in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon. The paper argues that terror and trauma constitute a strategic technique by which Darko de…
Art (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (5 works) · History (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · African history and culture studies (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works)