Dr. Cati Coe's study, "Representing Culture in School: Nationalism, Youth, and the Transformation of Knowledge in Ghana" analyzes how the state in Ghana has been engaged in appropriating local cultural traditions through schools in order to cement national unity and its own legitimacy.

The study found that the state’s ability to use schools to teach cultural knowledge was limited because 1) the Christian identities of students and teachers rendered the teaching of culture associated with the demonic problematic; and 2) local notions of the relationship between age and cultural authority meant that the teaching of cultural knowledge to young people upset authority relations between elders and youth.

This study therefore raises important questions about how Africans are negotiating the tensions raised by the competing visions of modernity that nationalism and Christianity create, as well as about the limits of state power. It does so by examining the interactions of agents in a key site for the production of both modernity and the state in Africa, that is, schools.

For more information, please contact
Dr. Coe at ccoe@camden.rutgers.edu