Deliberating Ghana: Postcolonial Rhetorics, Culture, and Democracy (Rhetoric & Public Affairs)

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.

Stephen Kwame Dadugblor is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He completed his PhD in English, with a concentration in rhetoric, at the University of Texas at Austin, and his dissertation was nominated for the Outstanding Dissertation Award. He was also awarded the 2021 James L. Kinneavy Prize for Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition. His research focuses on rhetoric, democratic deliberation, postcolonial/decolonial rhetorics, and digital media, with specific interest in the ways that African societies draw upon cultural deliberative resources to refashion and decolonize their social and political worlds in the aftermath of colonialism.,