MOBILITY AND CULTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN AMA ATA AIDOO’S ANOWA

Abstract

This paper examines the historiographical drama of Anowa, with a focus on the cultural, socio-economic, and spiritual specificities of the world that the characters inhabit and attempt to traverse. Ama Ata Aidoo elaborates in this play translocal practices and beliefs about metaphysical forces, specifically those that have an impact on the modern mobile African subject’s trajectories. The paper posits that in Anowa, Aidoo re-positions the autochthonous, re-maps the cultural frontier, and re-claims the space for Africa’s spiritual economies. It argues that by re-inscribing the cultural practices and beliefs onto the figures of Anowa and Kofi Ako, the playwright demonstrates that for the modern transnational and/or mobile African subject, roots and routes are intrinsically bound. The main insight of the paper is that the spatial assertions about practices of autochthony are connected to African teleologies of progress, and that these work in tension and in tandem with the temporal realities of global neoliberal capitalism.