scholarly journals Post-Coloniality: Projection of Ghana In Video-Films

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-113
Author(s):  
Augustine Danso

The rise of the mainstream video industry has been significant towards socio-cultural and economic development in Ghana; however, this study will not focus on the impacts of the video industry of Ghana. This article primarily examines the image construction of Ghana in video-films. Over the past few years, videofilms in Post-colonial Ghana have often been critiqued by film scholars and critics for reinforcing superstitious beliefs and instigating backward tendencies that derail national development. Normative scholarships have critically explored the visuality of Ghanaian video-films and their themes. Nonetheless, these normative scholarships have often overlooked the nexus between the Ghanaian society and video texts. It is against this scholarly gap that this study engages the meta-question of how video-films project Ghana in their texts. This article will engage a critical textual reading of a few popular films from the Pentecostal and Occult genres to contextualize the ideological sub-texts and the image construction of Ghana in these selected video-films. I argue that major ‘postmodern’ thematic concerns in Ghanaian video-films considerably denigrate and malign Ghana’s image, as well as neglect issues of national interests.

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-122
Author(s):  
Simona Klimková

Abstract The implications of the colonialist discourse, which suggested that the colonized is a person “whose historical, physical, and metaphysical geography begins with European memory” (Thiong’o, 2009), urged postcolonial writers to correct these views by addressing the issues from their own perspectives. The themes of history and communal/national past thus play a prominent role in postcolonial literature as they are inevitably interwoven with the concept of communal identity. In Petals of Blood (1977), the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explores the implications of social change as brought about by the political and economic development during the post-independence period. This paper seeks to examine the crucial relation between personal and communal/national history and relate it to the writer’s views of principal legacies of colonialism. As Thiong’o states: “My interest in the past is because of the present and there is no way to discuss the future or present separate from the past” (Thiong’o, 1975). Clearly, the grasping of the past and one’s identification with it seems fundamental in discussing national development. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s narratives are always situated in the realm of political and historical context, blending fiction with fact, this paper also aims to elaborate on the implications of his vision.


Author(s):  
Vladimir Shedyakov

The purpose of the work is an intermediate summarization of study of the economic significance of experience and historical transformations of social pedagogy from the perspective of the tasks of providing organic ways for the people to increase the level of public safety and development as a condition for the effectiveness of anti-crisis regulation. The applied methods are based on the unity of historical and logical elements, analysis and synthesis. When preparing to participate in the confrontation of cultural and civilizational worlds covering different spheres of life, it is extremely important to be able to apply the best of the past to solve new problems. In particular, both effective anti-crisis regulation and successful protection of national interests and their identity presuppose a careful attitude to the basic value-semantic complexes in the spiritual and moral forms of communication and development. This, in turn, focuses on a special consideration of the period of intensive personality formation, maturation and civil development of a person in providing anti-crisis regulation. So, social pedagogy should not only focus on the changing structure of the economy, but it also should reflect the development of economic perception of the possibilities of controllability, self-control and uncontrollability with increasing uncertainty of the environment. This lays the foundation for a fluid balance of strategy, tactics and operations in management compositions, increasing the effectiveness of anti-crisis measures.


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
Clinton D. Young

This article examines the development of Wagnerism in late-nineteenth-century Spain, focusing on how it became an integral part of Catalan nationalism. The reception of Wagner's music and ideas in Spain was determined by the country's uneven economic development and the weakness of its musical and political institutions—the same weaknesses that were responsible for the rise of Catalan nationalism. Lack of a symphonic culture in Spain meant that audiences were not prepared to comprehend Wagner's complexity, but that same complexity made Wagner's ideas acceptable to Spanish reformers who saw in the composer an exemplar of the European ideas needed to fix Spanish problems. Thus, when Wagner's operas were first staged in Spain, the Teatro Real de Madrid stressed Wagner's continuity with operas of the past; however, critics and audiences engaged with the works as difficult forms of modern music. The rejection of Wagner in the Spanish capital cleared the way for his ideas to be adopted in Catalonia. A similar dynamic occurred as Spanish composers tried to meld Wagner into their attempts to build a nationalist school of opera composition. The failure of Tomás Bréton's Los amantes de Teruel and Garín cleared the way for Felip Pedrell's more successful theoretical fusion of Wagnerism and nationalism. While Pedrell's opera Els Pirineus was a failure, his explanation of how Wagner's ideals and nationalism could be fused in the treatise Por nuestra música cemented the link between Catalan culture and Wagnerism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 40407-1-40407-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ran Pang ◽  
He Huang ◽  
Tri Dev Acharya

Abstract Yongding River is one of the five major river systems in Beijing. It is located to the west of Beijing. It has influenced culture along its basin. The river supports both rural and urban areas. Furthermore, it influences economic development, water conservation, and the natural environment. However, during the past few decades, due to the combined effect of increasing population and economic activities, a series of changes have led to problems such as the reduction in water volume and the exposure of the riverbed. In this study, remote sensing images were used to derive land cover maps and compare spatiotemporal changes during the past 40 years. As a result, the following data were found: forest changed least; cropland area increased to a large extent; bareland area was reduced by a maximum of 63%; surface water area in the study area was lower from 1989 to 1999 because of the excessive use of water in human activities, but it increased by 92% from 2010 to 2018 as awareness about protecting the environment arose; there was a small increase in the built-up area, but this was more planned. These results reveal that water conservancy construction, agroforestry activities, and increasing urbanization have a great impact on the surrounding environment of the Yongding River (Beijing section). This study discusses in detail how the current situation can be attributed to of human activities, policies, economic development, and ecological conservation Furthermore, it suggests improvement by strengthening the governance of the riverbed and the riverside. These results and discussion can be a reference and provide decision support for the management of southwest Beijing or similar river basins in peri-urban areas.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 1017-1038
Author(s):  
V.V. Smirnov

Subject. The article investigates financial flows. Objectives. The study is to determine directions of financial flows in global social and economic entities. Methods. I rely upon the systems approach and methods of descriptive statistics. Results. The article illustrates the importance of national interests in financial flows of global social and economic entities. I emphasize that finance is a factor determining the importance of national interests. Finance mirrors the national development and opportunities of a social and economic entity to protect its sovereignty. Sustainable development seems to be the ground for solving any issues of national interests as part of financial flows of social and economic entities. This may be feasible through fund raising. I determined directions of financial flows streaming to socialist and capitalist social and economic entities. In Russia capitalist social and economic entities emerge due to a positively-skewed distribution of values around the average growth rate of direct investment in non-financial assets and portfolio investment, and a negatively-skewed distribution, i.e. military spending, inflation, fiscal revenue and general reserves net of gold. The article highlights that Russia and China have similar economic views on poverty and equality. Conclusions and Relevance. As global economic ties transform and controversies concerning the world order escalate, capitalist economies disregard the specifics of the social and economic paradigm and national interests of other countries. Such controversies can be eliminated if multiple economic interests are simplified. Sustainable development and respective goals seem to offer a solution to national interests as part of financial flows of social and economic entities. The findings unveil opportunities for exercising national interests in global social and economic entities by regulating a source of financial flows, generating new competencies for managerial decision-making on sustainable development goals.


1965 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Dorfam

It takes more than ordinary population for a group of strangers to recommends changes in the efforts of a great nation to contend with a problem that goes that goes to the very roofs of its social structure and its livelihood. Yet we did just that in our Report on Land and Water Development in the Indus Plain[l]. We hoped our recommendations would be considered sympathetically and debated fully, that our sound suggestions would be adopted and our unsound ones forgiven. All this has been granted us, and more. The months since the Panel's report was prepared have been eventful for the economic development of West Pakistan. It is hard to cast our minds back to the gloom that filled the atmosphere when the Panel was convened. Food production had been stagnant for the past several years, sem and thur were spreading through the most productive portions of the Plain, expensive efforts to control these twin menaces had been baffled. WAPDA knew, of course, that in principle tubswells could do the job, but there were more failures to report than successes


Author(s):  
Marcin Piatkowski

In this chapter I explain why Poland and most countries in Eastern Europe have always lagged behind Western Europe in economic development. I discuss why in the past the European continent split into two parts and how Western and Eastern Europe followed starkly different developmental paths. I then demonstrate how Polish oligarchic elites built extractive institutions and how they adopted ideologies, cultures, and values, which undermined development from the late sixteenth century to 1939. I also describe how the elites created a libertarian country without taxes, state capacity, and rule of law, and how this ‘golden freedom’ led to Poland’s collapse and disappearance from the map of Europe in 1795. I argue that Polish extractive society was so well established that it could not reform itself from the inside. It was like a black hole, where the force of gravity is so strong that the light could not come out.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
John Fitzgerald ◽  
Sanna Ojanperä ◽  
Neave O’Clery

AbstractIt is well-established that the process of learning and capability building is core to economic development and structural transformation. Since knowledge is ‘sticky’, a key component of this process is learning-by-doing, which can be achieved via a variety of mechanisms including international research collaboration. Uncovering significant inter-country research ties using Scopus co-authorship data, we show that within-region collaboration has increased over the past five decades relative to international collaboration. Further supporting this insight, we find that while communities present in the global collaboration network before 2000 were often based on historical geopolitical or colonial lines, in more recent years they increasingly align with a simple partition of countries by regions. These findings are unexpected in light of a presumed continual increase in globalisation, and have significant implications for the design of programmes aimed at promoting international research collaboration and knowledge diffusion.


2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 183-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
James To

The overseas Chinese (OC) form a vast network of powerful interest groups and important political actors capable of shaping the future of China from abroad by transmitting values back to their ancestral homeland (Tu 1991). While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) welcomes and actively seeks to foster relations with the OC in order to advance China's national interests, some cohorts may be hostile to the regime. In accordance with their distinct demographic and ethnic profiles, the CCP's qiaowu ([Formula: see text], OC affairs) infrastructure serves to entice, co-opt, or isolate various OC groupings. This article summarises the policies for managing different subsets of OC over the past three decades, and argues that through qiaowu, the CCP has successfully unified cooperative groups for China's benefit, while preventing discordant ones from eroding its grip on power.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document