Bleeding Palimpsests: Heritage Tourism and The Commodification of Indigenous Memory In Northern Ghana

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Citations

Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/pn89d781s

Abstract

This dissertation’s overarching thesis is that continental Bulsa histories and epistemologies complicate discourses of heritage tourism and scholarship of the slave trade. Through applying critical Africana and decolonial indigenous studies lenses, I make three overarching claims. First, I disrupt the artificial boundaries or epistemic apartheid (Rabaka 1-5) imposed on indigenous knowledge while challenging the colonial frameworks embedded in heritage tourism, which divide Ghana into the coast and the “hinterland” or “bush” in Northern Ghana. Secondly, I argue that cultural knowledge about the people’s lived experience during this horrific time of kidnapping and genocide are distorted by people who come looking for overt narrativization and memorialization of traumatic history. Thirdly, I show that it is essential to understand that different groups of people in Ghana today are navigating this history’s legacy as part of the daily struggles against racism and neo-colonialism.

I develop a method of reading between the cracks to recover indigenous Bulsa epistemology, which shows that the people were fighting genocide and destruction and not the slave trade as dominant history suggests. I conclude that what the Bulsa history and epistemology offer is an opportunity to examine what happened in the past but even more profoundly, an opportunity for true dialogue in the present.

Creator