Headstrong : Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bowles, Laurian R.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Porters--Ghana--Accra--Social conditions--21st century.

Porters.

Women--Employment--Ghana--Accra.

Women.

Women--Ghana--Accra--Social conditions--21st century.

Internal migrants--Employment--Ghana--Accra.

Internal migrants.

Internal migrants--Ghana--Accra--Social conditions--21st century.

Markets--Ghana--Accra--Employees.

Markets.

Accra (Ghana)--Economic conditions--21st century.

Accra (Ghana).

Accra (Ghana)--Race relations.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (185 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025.

Summary:

"Headstrong explores the experiences of women porters, called kayayei, in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, anthropologist Laurian R. Bowles shows how kayayei navigate precarity, bringing into sharp relief how racialization, rooted in histories of colonialism and enslavement, undergirds capital accumulation in Ghana. Bowles's ethnographic storytelling follows these women through their work as human transporters at Ghanaian markets. In creatively reappropriating public spaces as private sanctuaries, and in reimagining expected social relations through the cultivation of liberatory same-sex intimacies, kayayei develop ways to cope with the demands of their arduous labor while refusing narratives of victimhood projected on African women. Bowles's analysis of the emotional labor of the gig economy in Africa shows how the infrastructure anxieties of a modernizing city intersect with the complexities of blackness in a racially homogeneous nation, uncovering how antiblackness emerges in everyday public discourse, development agendas, and privately expressed anxieties about labor, gender, and sexual politics in Accra. Illustrating how race, sexuality, and gender manifest in daily life, Bowles centers kayayei, often perceived to be obstacles to progress and modernity, at the forefront for understanding urban Ghana's aspirations and anxieties about what it means to be a modern African country. Grounded in African feminist theory and Black feminist ethnography, Headstrong uses women's narratives as the central analytic for understanding the look and feel of modernity in Accra, challenging long-standing notions of gender, race, and desire in Africa"--Publisher's description.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Introduction

1. Makola Fires: Old and New

2. Racial Transcripts of Modernity

3. Radical Listening and Haptic Sifting

4. Queering Polygamy

5. Milly, Rastabroni, and a Hothead

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-5128-2466-6

OCLC:

1518584721