Performing the nation and subnational differences in African national days

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Carola Lentz
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2013 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 222346160

The project examines the relationship between national belonging and similar membership categories such as ethnicity and regionalism as well as diverse kinds of differences like profession, social class, gender, age or political orientation. Inextricably intertwined with state-making, nation-building is a process in which higher-level differences (between nations) are made to downplay cross-cutting, and potentially competing, differences by recasting them as complementary, lower-level internal variations. Important to the making of higher-level national differences is the definition of external enemies and internal minorities, as well as the deployment of discourses and performances of national unity and shared national identity. The project explores how na-tional and sub-national differences are staged, downplayed or emphasised in symbolic represen-tations and performances of the nation during national-day festivities in Burkina Faso, Côte dIvoire and Ghana. The project studies national days in a historical and a regionally comparative perspective, paying special attention to the relationship between centre and periphery (festivities in the capital vs. in regional centres), as well as the relationship between national-day celebrations and other festivities, such as cultural festivals. Furthermore, it explores how different nation-states deal with internal heterogeneity regarding ethnicity, class, age, gender and political orientiation, investigating the cases of Burkina Faso, Côte dIvoire and Ghana, three neighbouring countries with distinct colonial experiences and divergent trajectories of nation-building and state-making.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1939: Un/doing Differences. Practices of Human Differentiation
• International Connection: Belgium, Côte d´Ivoire, France, Ghana, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Kelly M. Askew; Professor Dr. Kofi Baku; Dr. Benoit Beucher; Dr. Mathias Gadou Dakouri; Professorin Dr. Odile Goerg; Professor Dr. Achim von Oppen