Jennifer Hart's publishes new book on mobility in Africa

The Indiana University Press has published Assistant Professor Jennifer Hart's new book, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation.

Summary

As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel.

Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.

Reviews

"Automobile technology was quickly and fluidly remade and redefined to suit local uses--in ways that alter how we think about economy, society, and modernity, as well as modes of African inventiveness: the capacity to divert, adapt, or redesign material goods or objects, how we think about them, their histories, and cultural possibilities."

William Cunningham Bissell, author of Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar

"Jennifer Hart has an acute ear for listening to stories and noticing important themes in the narratives and archives.... such fascinating material."

Jamie Monson, author of Africa's Freedom Railway