Imagining futures : memory and belonging in an African family / Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lentz, Carola, author.

Lobnibe, Isidore, author.

Series:

Gale eBooks

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Families--Africa, West.

Families.

Extended families--Africa, West.

Extended families.

Memory--Social aspects--Africa, West.

Memory.

Africa, West--Social life and customs.

Africa, West.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 275 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2022]

Summary:

"What keeps a family together? In Imagining Futures, authors Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe offer a unique look at one extended African family, currently comprising over five hundred members in Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso. Members of this extended family, like many others in the region, find themselves living increasingly farther apart and working in diverse occupations ranging from religious clergy and civil service to farming. What keeps them together as a family? In their groundbreaking work, Lentz and Lobnibe argue that shared memories, rather than only material interests, bind a family together. Imagining Futures explores the changing practices of remembering in an African family and offers a unique contribution to the growing field of memory studies, beyond the usual focus of Europe and America. Lentz and Lobnibe explore how, in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world, memories themselves are not static accounts of past events but are actually malleable and shaped by both current concerns and imagined futures"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Celebrating home and family unity : the 2016 Yob Homecoming Festival

Remembering the ancestors : family anecdotes, "quarrel stories," and migration and settlement narratives

Constructing an ancestral heritage : the first literate family member's politics of memory

Keeping the home fires burning : labor migration, heroic tales, and mocking songs

Creating a new order : Christian models of family life

Social mobility and moral obligations : remembering educational trajectories

Urban nostalgia for ancestral traditions : new genres of family memory

Making a good name for the family : funerals, memory, and public prestige

Stemming the tide of dispersal : the young generation's understandings of family and memory practices

Unfinished business : remembering for the future.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-253-06019-2

0-253-06018-4

OCLC:

1290722409