Adinkra and Kente Cloth in History, Law, and Life

Adinkra and kente cloth have changed significantly in the course of their history first as markers of Asante royal power and then of Ghanaian cultural distinction. Once handmade and reserved for the exclusive use of the Asante ruler, cheap mass-produced reproductions now proliferate in Ghanaian markets. In attempting to use intellectual property law to regulate their appropriation, the Ghanaian state has set the conditions for further changes in these fabrics, their designs, and their sources of authority. This paper examines the implications of changing political and regulatory contexts for the past present and future meanings of adinkra and kente cloth for the people who produce and use them

Black Indigeneities, Contested Sovereignties

In this article, I examine race, indigeneity, and sovereignty in order to understand the relationship between them as they structure the lives of Black people on the continent of Africa and in the African diaspora. Specifically, I am interested in Black Indigeneities and explore the following questions: What are Black Indigeneities, beyond the connections between African-descended and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas, especially the U.S.? Indigeneity implies ties to land and heritage, but what does it look like when those ties have been weakened or severed? What does it look like for places and people living with the consequences of different but related histories of settler and indirect colonization and chattel slavery on both sides of the Atlantic? Rather than trying to arrive at definitive responses, I use these questions as a point of departure for outlining an analytical framework that identifies sovereignty as a crucial element in understanding the diversity of Black Indigenous histories and experience under different but related structures of power. I distinguish between indigeneities of remembering and indigeneities of recovery. I also seek to go beyond the concept of arrivantcy as a framework for understanding the indigeneities of African-descended peoples in the Americas

African Culture in the Global Marketplace: The Case of Folklore and Intellectual Property in Ghana

273 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.This study examines issues of power as they arise around the international regulation of intellectual property and, in particular, as they relate to the regulation of knowledge originating in Africa. Specifically, the study examines the power implications of the treatment of folklore as intellectual property, taking Ghana's copyright protection of folklore as a case, and focusing on adinkra and kente textiles which are included among protected Ghanaian folklore. The study reviews the major debates on the current regulation of intellectual property around concepts such as the commons, authorship, ownership, piracy and appropriation. It also examines policy practices around these concepts both internationally and in Ghana. At the international level, those policy practices have changed considerably over the past 30 years. The study considers the consequences of those changes for Africa and other regions of the global South, and locates the examination of Ghanaian policy practices within the regulatory context that has emerged out of that 30-year history. The study also examines authorship, ownership, and appropriation of folklore as they are perceived and practiced by Ghanaian folklore producers and users. It considers the ways in which those perceptions and practices are similar to and different to the ways in which authorship, ownership and appropriation are conceptualized in both national and international intellectual property regulations. The study uses a materialist cultural studies approach that is informed by neo-Marxist political economy and feminist standpoint theory. The research methodology used also draws upon feminist and interpretive approaches.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD