NYAS Lecture, April 13th: Colonial Dioramas and the Neocolonial Picaresque: Ghana’s Environmental Afterlives in a Tale of Three Pits

The diorama holds both literal and metaphorical significance for me in this presentation. Whether in paintings or museum displays, dioramas both legitimized and made “real” colonial habitation. Through these representations, the geocultural realities of the colonized were distorted and disfigured through processes of extraction, irreparably transforming their human and non-human environments. Thus, the “image burden,” to echo Chinua Achebe, borne by the African body and their environments, became an environmental burden. In this presentation, I turn to Ghana to tell a story that unravels how colonial dioramas entrenched picaresque conditions in the postcolonial moment. In so doing, I interlink three pits to frame the drastic consequences of the hollows of colonial dioramas. The first pit is emblematized by the naming of Ghana as the Gold Coast. This colonial nomenclature inevitably led to appearance of large mining concessions that hollowed out Ghana’s mineral resources. The extractive promise of the Gold Coast displaced and dispossessed the colonized, creating the second pit in the phenomenon of Galamsey, the unregulated small-scale mining that now beleaguers Ghana. Finally, I locate the third pit in the pit left in the wake of the construction of Ghana’s National Cathedral. Oxymoronically described by Ghanaians as the world’s most expensive pit, the discursive uproar generated by this project, I argue, metaphorizes the hollows and horrors of the environmental picaresque in Ghana.

4:15 pm—Doors open

4:30 – 6:00 pm—Presentation and Q&A

6:00 – 7:00 pm—Reception with light refreshments

New York Academy of Sciences
115 Broadway, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10006
(just south of Zuccotti Park)
or you can attend virtually on Zoom

Kwame Edwin Otu
Associate Professor of African Anthropology
African Studies Program Georgetown University

Robyn D’Avignon
Associate Professor of History New York University