Anima Adjepong - Böcker

Focusing on the story of women’s football in Ghana, this to book tells the universal story of women’s struggle for full and equal citizenship from a uniquely African and postcolonial perspective.Exploring themes of gender, sexuality, national identity, and culture, Ghana’s Black Queens situates women’s football in Ghana within the context of international, national, and local politics, to show how FIFA’s decision to establish the Women’s World Cup in 1991 had direct implications on a burgeoning women’s football landscape that had previously been ignored by the Ghana Football Administration. A focus on the tenacity of the administrators, journalists and pioneering players who helped to establish a national women’s football league in the postcolonial nation shows how African women launched an indigenous struggle against gender inequality, negotiated with heterosexual patriarchy, and navigated through transnational capital. With insights from in-depth interviews, newspaper and personal archives, and ethnography at matches around the country, Ghana’s Black Queens paints a vibrant picture of the struggles and successes of the athletes and administrators who helped to make women’s football a reality in the postcolonial nation, and the implications of their efforts on the sporting landscape today. Ghana’s Black Queens is a sociologically rich text that allows readers to draw broad connections between the immediate story and the larger struggle for women’s equality within the world of soccer and beyond.

Focusing on the story of women’s football in Ghana, this to book tells the universal story of women’s struggle for full and equal citizenship from a uniquely African and postcolonial perspective.Exploring themes of gender, sexuality, national identity, and culture, Ghana’s Black Queens situates women’s football in Ghana within the context of international, national, and local politics, to show how FIFA’s decision to establish the Women’s World Cup in 1991 had direct implications on a burgeoning women’s football landscape that had previously been ignored by the Ghana Football Administration. A focus on the tenacity of the administrators, journalists and pioneering players who helped to establish a national women’s football league in the postcolonial nation shows how African women launched an indigenous struggle against gender inequality, negotiated with heterosexual patriarchy, and navigated through transnational capital. With insights from in-depth interviews, newspaper and personal archives, and ethnography at matches around the country, Ghana’s Black Queens paints a vibrant picture of the struggles and successes of the athletes and administrators who helped to make women’s football a reality in the postcolonial nation, and the implications of their efforts on the sporting landscape today. Ghana’s Black Queens is a sociologically rich text that allows readers to draw broad connections between the immediate story and the larger struggle for women’s equality within the world of soccer and beyond.

Beyond simplistic binaries of "the dark continent" or "Africa rising," Africans at home and abroad articulate their identities through their quotidian practices and cultural politics. Amongst the privileged classes, these articulations can be characterized as Afropolitan projects--cultural, political, and aesthetic expressions of global belonging rooted in African ideals. This ethnographic study examines the Afropolitan projects of Ghanaians living in two cosmopolitan cities: Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana. Anima Adjepong's focus shifts between the cities, exploring contests around national and pan-African cultural politics, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Focusing particularly on queer sexuality, Adjepong offers unique insight into the contemporary sexual politics of the Afropolitan class. The book expands and complicates existing research by providing an in-depth transnational case study that not only addresses questions of cosmopolitanism, class, and racial identity but also considers how gender and sexuality inform the racialized identities of Africans in the United States and in Ghana. Bringing an understudied cohort of class-privileged Africans to the forefront, Adjepong offers a more fully realized understanding of the diversity of African lives.