Ghanaian poets, novelists, and playwrights are reworking European literary forms—sonnets, novels, print publishing—into tools for cultural independence, and this project tracks exactly how they do it. The problem is that literary studies has no clear vocabulary for describing what happens when one culture takes up another’s literary materials under conditions of decolonisation. Standard terms like “influence” or “borrowing” fail to capture the political weight of a Ghanaian writer adapting a British genre for anti-colonial purposes. LITAID fills that gap by building a typology of appropriative strategies specific to Africa and its diaspora. If successful, the project will give scholars, educators, and cultural policymakers a concrete framework for understanding how arts education, publishing networks, and transnational literary exchanges actually shaped decolonisation. This is primarily fundamental research in literary and cultural studies—it will not directly change infrastructure or supply chains. But a clearer account of how literary materials travel and transform could eventually inform how postcolonial societies design their own arts curricula, publishing industries, and cultural institutions, rather than inheriting them from former colonial powers.
View original technical description
LITAID addresses fundamental questions about the materials of literature - the stuff from which poems, plays, novels and stories are made - and about how these are appropriated from one literary culture for another. It does this by focusing on literary decolonization in Africa and its diaspora, because here the meanings of appropriation are particularly vexed. LITAID looks especially at the literary field in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence from Britain and an early focus of decolonial activism and art. It considers this field's transnational dimensions from the perspective of (a) local artists and institutions; and (b) literary travellers who came seeking decolonial resources for their own communities. The research question driving LITAID is: what modes of appropriation arise within and respond to the demands of literary decolonization? The project produces an original typology of appropriative strategies; describes distinctive forms of South-South transnationalism; outlines a new methodology for world literary criticism oriented to Africa and its diaspora; gives an account of the role of the arts in decolonization and the means of decolonizing the arts; and examines the nature and portability of literary materials. To these ends, LITAID adopts an innovative approach combining methodologies of world literature, literary sociology, book history, poetics and narratology, the history of education, and digital humanities. It gives ground-breaking accounts of (1) Ghanaian print culture; (2) arts education policy and the role of schools and universities in literary decolonization; (3) the transnational dimensions of Ghanaian literary culture; (4) relations between Ghanaian, South African, Caribbean and African American literary cultures; and (5) the careers of several major authors including Efua Sutherland, J. H. Nketia, Richard Wright, Kamau Brathwaite and Guy Butler. Its outputs will include 9 journal articles and 4 monographs.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know