Be(com)ing Asante, be(com)ing Akan

Thoughts on gender, identity and the colonial encounter

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20052572
AutoresJean Allman (0000-0003-3410-4839, autor de correspondencia)
Año2000
Páginas97-118
Fecha de publicación2000-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaEthnicity in Ghana (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/978-1-349-62337-2_5
OpenAlexW2477026242
ISBN9781349623372
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas29

The issues tentatively explored in this chapter1 — gender, identity and the colonial encounter in Asante — can be framed by two extraordinary, though very different, photographs, taken approximately forty years apart. The first (Figure 5.1) is of the king of Asante, Asantehene Agyeman Prempe I, and the Queenmother, Asantehernaa Yaa Kyaa, seated with a small group of retainers. The picture was taken in Elmina shortly after their arrest in Kumasi by British forces early in 1896. It is one of the few photographs we have in which the (in)famous Asantehemaa appears. Reviled by her eventual captors as ‘influential and unscrupulous’, ‘wicked but astute’, Yaa Kyaa opposed any accommodation to British interests in the years preceding her arrest. The photograph in question, which has been republished numerous times, signifies in very dramatic, gendered ways the British colonial ‘capture’ of Asante.2

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Ethnology · Identity (music) · Indigenous · Sociology · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · History