UCLA

Traditional annual festivals in Ghana have drawn considerable attention from scholars for their rich visual spectacle and artistry, but researchers have been comparatively slow to consider their profound sonic dimensions—how festival sound creates communities, shapes senses of place, and produces identities through embodied experiences of performance. Focusing on Hɔmɔwɔ, the great annual harvest festival celebrated by the Ga people of Greater Accra, this dissertation alternatively places festivals within the frame of ethnomusicology and sound studies to argue that festival music, sound, and performance provide a privileged window into contemporary understandings of Ga identity and the cultural politics of ethnic minority in Accra. Festivals are not only oriented towards the past and ancestral rites, but provide a reflexive, performative frame for Accra’s Ga communities to envision themselves in the present and assert the value of their cultural heritage—described as kusum in the Ga language—in an era of rapid social and economic transformations in Accra.

Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic research in the Ga-Mashie neighborhood of Central Accra between 2016–2021, this dissertation asks what it means to stage heritage and “sound” Ga culture in a multiethnic, cosmopolitan city that is simultaneously a national capital, the seat of a parliamentary democratic government, and the home of a subnational Ga State. Taking a multi-genre approach to the multifaceted sonic practices and complexities of festival sound, this dissertation considers: (1) How festival music and sound create Ga space and shape mediated urban environments amid struggles to define the agency and continued vitality of Accra’s historic Ga communities. (2) How festival sound and performance provide spaces for Ga musicians to mobilize festivals and heritage as a means of producing various kinds of value, pursuing projects, and advocating for their communities. (3) How festivals represent key sites of community organizing and agency within the Ga-Mashie community, sustained by robust local networks and alternative media infrastructures characterized by independence, entrepreneurial creativity, and reciprocity.