Africa Table: Hip-Life's Public Intellectuals and the Ghanaian Public Sphere: Tweaa…, Donkomi, and International Fisherman

Join the Center for African Studies for their weekly lunchtime seminar series.

Speaker: Harry Odamtten, Assistant Professor, History Department, University of Santa Clara

Hiplife’s Public Intellectuals and the Ghanaian Public Sphere seeks to begin a conversation about Ghanaian Hip-Life musicians as Public Intellectuals by tracing the history of public protest or social satire in Ghanaian song compositions, and identifying peculiar ways by which the public acts of hip-lifer’s differ from antecedent genres. Odamtten focuses on Hip-Life’s cultural hybridity, its relationship to the nation’s civic institutions, and various social media as well as cyberpolitan landscapes or global circuits of technology. In doing this, he challenges the current orthodoxy or thinking of public intellectualism as the preserve of academics/scholars who speak on public issues affecting society.

Harry N. K. Odamtten is Assistant Professor of African and Atlantic History at Santa Clara University, and holds a Dual Ph.D. in History, and African American and African Studies from Michigan State University. Odamtten, a Compton Africa Peace Fellow is an intellectual and social historian. His research activities span African and African Diaspora Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Hip-Hop and Public Culture.  He is also the book review editor for the Journal of West African History.  Odamtten is currently revising his first book manuscript, Afropublican Intellectuals: The "Black Atlantic," and Pan-Africanism. Expect his latest publication “Dode Akabi: The Oral and Textual Narrative of a “Wicked” Female King,” in the Journal of Women’s History (Autumn 2015 (volume 27, Issue 3) Some of his most recent publications include “Morality, the Sacred and God in Ghanaian Hip- Hop” in Hip Hop Spirituality and Urban God Talk, Edited by Andre E. Johnson (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013) and "Critical departures in the Practice of Pan-Africanism" in Pan-Africanism, Citizenship and Identity Edited by Toyin Falola and Kwame Essien (New York: Routledge, 2013).