Afropolitan Projects by Anima Adjepong

Author:Anima Adjepong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Cultural Producers as “Insiders-Without”

“I see a lot of my friends going through a lot of stress because they can’t mingle with the common people,” Eli told me between gulps of fufu and soup. “We, we are for the common people. We are the common people.” The common people about whom Eli spoke were at times referred to by others as the grassroots or the “typical Ghanaian.” These seemingly benign terms are classed and construct those to whom the terms refer as simultaneously authentic in their Ghanaianness and outsiders in a modern world. Asked to explain who the common people were, Eli said, “The common people are people who are not wealthy in society, the people who don’t have a lot of societal privileges.” Notice that Eli positioned himself and those like him (that “we”) both as “for the common people” and as “the common people.” This slippage represents what I am calling the “insider-without” position, which many in this artist-activist community occupied. The insider-without has previously assimilated into the norms of dominant society and now steps outside to challenge those norms in the service of social change.

In contrast, the outsider-within is one with which readers may be familiar.5 This phrase articulates the experience of marginalized people when they are presumably included in dominant systems. One example is that of a lesbian invited into a women’s reading group. Although the women’s group may not name itself as heterosexual, the lesbian might quickly find herself marginalized by the foundational assumptions that inform discussions and the books that are chosen. As an outsider-within, she may be obligated to assimilate a heterosexual standpoint that devalues her experiences in order to fit into the group. Or she can embrace the position of outsider-within and offer necessary insights into the unstated assumptions that inform the group’s experiences of the texts they read and their interpretations of the material. The outsider-within offers an interpretation of a world about which insiders, those for whom the system works, may know very little. Through her engagement with the inside, the outsider-within can educate insiders about their complicity in making her experiences of the world marginal.

For the cultural brokers in this study to become insiders-without, they first had to be outsiders-within. In this context, the position of the insider-without redoubles. First as postcolonial subjects, Africans are conscripted into modernity (i.e., the inside) through violence and alienation from themselves. Recall from chapter 3 Aku and Rachel, who both described feeling disconnected from authentic Ghanaian experiences and who, as adults, sought to reconnect with a sense of being Ghanaian. These descriptions are articulations of being on the inside of modernity, which is constructed as apart from being African. Those who are permitted into the system as outsiders-within through their education in mission schools and later international schools, their work as intermediaries between the colonial class and the Ghanaian people, and their facility with Western cultures come to understand the ways that they are conditionally included. In order to be fully accepted as insiders,

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