Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village, 1850-1950

Book Description
An account of the life of a Ghanaian village during a century of tumultuous change, this study is also a richly textured microhistory and an exploration of the meanings of history and modernity in an African context. In this book, compelling in both its historical detail and analytic sophistication, McCaskie provides a deep cultural reading that ranges over issues of selfhood and community and the impact on them of the colonial experience.


About the Author
T. C. McCaskie holds the only established university post in Asante Studies, as Reader in Asante History at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham. He is author of State and Society in Precolonial Asante and of numerous papers on Asante.


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"This study of the people of the Asante village of Adeebeba - now part of Kumase, Ghana's second city - over the century 1850 to 1950 is unparalleled in its wealth of detail about the concerns of ordinary African men and women in a period of tumultuous change. In exploring their testimony in all its rich diversity, McCaskie draws out its larger implications for the understanding of Asante identities in a world overtaken by colonialism and modernity. Community and belonging, politics and belief, rural and urban lifestyles, money, mobility and sex, and all the other daily concerns of Adeebeba villagers are discussed in depth. The result is a book that in unequalled in its recuperation of the African past through African voices."--BOOK JACKET.


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