Alison Okuda, associate professor of history, recently was awarded the Outstanding Article Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. The prize is awarded annually to honor an exceptional peer-reviewed article focused on Africa and/or the African diaspora.
The groundbreaking article, published last year in the flagship journal of her field, African Studies Review, explores the influence of the Black Power movement and soul music in Ghana during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Titled “Black Power, Raw Soul, and Race in Ghana”, the article examines how Ghanaian youth at the time were deeply engaged with and inspired by the Black Power movement and the surge of soul music coming out of the United States. Through her research, Okuda found that many young Ghanaians saw the Black Power message as highly relevant to their own political and economic struggles, and they sought to adapt it to an African context.
The research draws from a range of sources, including digitized African American magazines and Ghanaian newspapers from the era, to uncover perspectives beyond the elite political narratives that often dominate this topic, she said.
The article offers a unique perspective on the cultural and political connections between Ghana and the African diaspora during a pivotal
historical period, including exchange programs. “Other researchers were not really talking about this aspect of that late ’60s, early ’70s political movement,” Okuda said. “Previous work very much focused on Black Power in North America, a little bit in Britain, a little bit in the Caribbean, but there was not much on West Africa.”
She found that soul music by James Brown and other Americans was hugely popular and “dominated the scene” in Ghana during this period. Ghanaian youth enthusiastically embraced the sound, seeing it as an expression of Black pride and liberation during a period of political instability. However, she also found that there was significant pushback within Ghana against both soul music and the Black Power movement.
“An important aspect of the article is that it shows young people in postcolonial West Africa were thinking about race but through their own context, experiences, and global interactions, whereas many people assume that race isn’t an issue in Africa,” Okuda said.
While Ghanaian youth were interested in and influenced by these U.S.-based cultural and political movements, the “soul fever” did not last beyond the early 1970s, Okuda found. By the middle of that decade, reggae music started to have a more lasting influence and impact in Ghana, as Ghanaians began reinterpreting and “remaking it as African,” she said.
Okuda said she felt “honored and humbled” when she found out she had won the prestigious prize. “I couldn’t even believe that I won, because the other two people who were nominated with me, I had read their work, and I was so impressed by it. And then to win over their articles was completely unexpected. It was a huge honor.”
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