Im Februar ist Grace Takyi Donkor von der University of Ghana zu Gast in unserem Plenum und hält einen Vortrag mit dem Titel „Women, Highlife Music and Cultural Memory in Ghana“. Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt.

This presentation explores the role of popular culture in shaping cultural memory and the political conse­quences of its erasures in Ghana. One such musical style which has shaped the cultural memory of Ghana is Highlife music. Highlife music is Ghana’s fore­most popular music form. The literature on Ghanaian popular music suggests a certain hege­monic historical context where its main contri­butors have largely been described as males. It argues that dominant histories of Ghanaian highlife music constitute a form of selective public memory, one that has systema­tically marginalized women’s contri­butions. This study performs an act of historical recovery by treating the popular sphere as a primary site where the past is legiti­mized or forgotten. Through archival research, song analysis, and the ethno­graphic life history of singer Edith Norteye (“Adorable Adorant”), it challenges the estab­lished narrative and demon­strates how women were crucial architects of the genre’s sound and social meaning. The presen­tation reveals that forgetting is not passive but a gendered process inherent in how cultural memory is built. It recovers these voices and funda­mentally rewires the histo­rical under­standing of highlife revealing it as a collabo­rative and contested social field rather than a linear progression led by men. The presen­tation concludes by linking this historical recovery to contem­porary battles over represen­tation, asking what more vibrant under­standing of Ghanaian culture becomes possible when we listen for the missing voices in our shared past.

Grace Takyi Donkor is a Lecturer at the Depart­ment of Music, University of Ghana. She lectures on Ghanaian and African popular musical arts and indigenous music traditions. Her research interests include gender issues in Ghanaian popular music, indigenous perfor­mance practices, and gospel music. She is particularly interested in the perfor­mance practices of female popular musicians and their various modes of represen­tation. She co-authored an article that interro­gates the concept of gospel highlife music in Ghana and Nigeria. Grace holds a PhD in Music from the University of Ghana, where she researched the “Represe­ntations of Women in Ghanaian Highlife Music (1940s-1960s)”.