Deliberating Ghana

In the early 2010s electoral disputes in Ghana garnered global attention and raised questions concerning the nature and future of democratic practice in postcolonial countries. In Deliberating Ghana: Postcolonial Rhetorics, Culture, and Democracy Stephen Kwame Dadugblor examines these disputes as they unfolded in Ghana's Supreme Court and in the public domain. Reading a diverse set of materials including courtroom discourse, social media artifacts, documentaries, parliamentary records, and op-eds, Dadugblor theorizes a cultural imaginaries orientation as a viable approach for understanding and decolonizing knowledge of democratic practice frequently tethered to Western epistemologies and conceptions. Organized around four key ideas about deliberation--the notion of speech, the utility of genre, the promises and perils of digital political participation, and the politics of memory--Deliberating Ghana situates rhetorical studies of democracy within African epistemologies, calling attention to how centering the postcolony can contribute to moving beyond well-worn binaries of West/non-West in studies of rhetoric, democracy, and deliberation, and toward decolonial possibilities. It offers fresh perspectives on foregrounding a society's indigenous knowledge and the messiness of its socio-political and rhetorical traditions to intervene in debates about the politics of knowledge production.