folk art

In Ghana, adinkra and kente textiles derive their significance from their association with both Asante and Ghanaian cultural nationalism. Adinkra, made by stenciling patterns with black dye, and kente, a type of strip weaving, each convey, through color, style, and adornment, the bearer’s identity, social status, and even emotional state. Yet both textiles have been widely mass-produced outside Ghana, particularly in East Asia, without any compensation to the originators of the designs.

In The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here, Boatema Boateng focuses on the appropriation and protection of adinkra and kente cloth in order to examine the broader implications of the use of intellectual property law to preserve folklore and other traditional forms of knowledge. Boateng investigates the compatibility of indigenous practices of authorship and ownership with those established under intellectual property law, considering the ways in which both are responses to the changing social and historical conditions of decolonization and globalization. Comparing textiles to the more secure copyright protection that Ghanaian musicians enjoy under Ghanaian copyright law, she demonstrates that different forms of social, cultural, and legal capital are treated differently under intellectual property law.

Boateng then moves beyond Africa, expanding her analysis to the influence of cultural nationalism among the diaspora, particularly in the United States, on the appropriation of Ghanaian and other African cultures for global markets. Boateng’s rich ethnography brings to the surface difficult challenges to the international regulation of both contemporary and traditional concepts of intellectual property, and questions whether it can even be done.

This article considers the intersection between African oral tradition and electronic literature by exploring the potential of Sankofa to interact with concrete poetry in an electronic space. Sankofa is an example of the Adinkra, a set of symbols that were originally created and used by the Akan in West Africa. These symbols have literary value which this article looks at in ways similar to concrete poetry; examining Sankofa as concrete poetry in an electronic context enables a simultaneous dovetailing with as well as convergence from oral and print based modes of engaging with the text: aspects of oral tradition influence this exploration.

Sankofa unlike most other Adinkra symbols has two variations as well as a strong connection to an oral folktale. Other elements of orality such as performance and narrative combine with these features to allow for an analysis of Sankofa through the lens of concrete poetry, both in terms of its Adinkra variation and its folktale rendition. In reverse, the unique implications of this analysis extend the visual-heavy features of concrete poetry due to the ways in which Sankofa impacts conventional understandings of orality, aurality, and the visual in concrete poetry.