Aesthetic Practices in African Tourism explores "Rastahood", a community, youth culture, and new tourist art form created by young men on the margins of the Ghanaian economy as they came of age at the turn of the millennium.
This book focuses on art, music, and affective experience created within tourism contexts, which enabled young men without educational or class capital to achieve mobility through work with foreigners, transforming the temporal horizon by expanding the geographic one. It traces the path that led young men down the path to Rastahood and investigates how they created an art form in, and of, a particular place and then used it to propel themselves far beyond its confines. The book ends with a leap forward into the present, out of Ghana, and beyond Rastahood, as men, now in middle age, look back upon the path that Rastahood created. It explores the social effects of neoliberal capitalism, specifically the rise of neoliberal subjectivities, collectivities, and socialities.
The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, tourism, art, African and Africana Studies, popular culture; gender studies; migration; youth studies and those interested in African cities.
Introduction: I and I: Artmaking, Mobility, and Intercultural Reproduction
Chapter 1: Geography Is Destiny: Craft in Accra
Chapter 2: Men at Work: Craftwork, Masculinity, and Precarity
Chapter 3: From Elephants to Drums: Object, Performance, Mobility
Chapter 4: Styling the Rasta Self
Chapter 5: The Affective Labor of Crafting Freedom
Conclusion: In the Beckoning Elsewhere
References
Biography
Ruti Talmor is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at Pitzer College and Chair of the Intercollegiate Media Studies Program at the Claremont Colleges. As a cultural anthropologist, an art curator, and a Professor of Media Studies, Talmor’s interdisciplinary work centers on how people use aesthetic objects and practices to craft a place for themselves in the world. This diverse but interrelated body of work sits at the intersection of the anthropology of art, media, and visual culture; the scholarship on migration, mobility, and global capitalism; gender and sexuality studies; and critical curatorial practice. Talmor has been a Fellow of the Getty Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, the McCracken Foundation, and the University of Michigan’s Center for Afroamerican and African Studies.
