Faculty: Research: Jesse Weaver Shipley
Jesse Weaver Shipley
I am an ethnographer and filmmaker. I received my Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from University of Chicago. My research focuses on Ghana and recent Africa Diasporas. I am interested in integrating creative visual forms and critical theory. My scholarly interests include African politics and religion, post-independence political economy, popular culture, critical human rights, sexuality, race, electronic mediation, film, and urban space. As an anthropologist and filmmaker, I am committed to exploring creative, new media approaches to research, teaching, writing, and image production. As film and new media increasingly permeate neoliberal, publics around the world, the anthropology of media and popular culture is increasingly vital in thinking through the changing nature of political power and its opposition, public violence, and the global circulation of race and sexuality.
My first book-length manuscript is entitled Speaking of Freedom: Performance and Public Authority in 20th Century Ghana and is based on 2 years of archival and urban ethnographic research mostly in Accra, Ghana. It traces the socio-historical emergence of urban, public culture in Accra, Ghana. I explore the transformation of public authority from state politics to private institutions over the course of the 20th century. I examine how performers across multimedia genres—including Pan-Africanist political ceremony, trickster storytelling, television soap operas, and Charismatic preaching—produce themselves as authoritative in the eyes of Accra’s urban populace. This ethnographic research was primarily conducted with theatre groups, television, radio, and film performers and culture/media workers.
For my second book project I explore the emergence of hip hop-related popular music in Accra. The manuscript entitled is Living and Preaching the Hiplife: Afro-Cosmopolitanism and Moral Mediation in Ghanaian Popular Culture. I conducted fieldwork with hiplife musicians, audiences, studios, and media institutions in Ghana and among Ghanaians in London and New York to examine how a popular performance genre refracts the changing nature of political economic subjectivity for young Africans. Hiplife music combines hip hop sampling, scratching, and rap lyricism with older forms of highlife popular music, traditional storytelling, and political-proverbial oratory. Artists rap in multiple Ghanaian languages, English, and pidgin. I argue that hiplife draws on the liberational aspects of Black Diasporic hip hop in espousing the possibilities of success. An authoritative masculine subject emerges in this music’s Pan-Africanist sensibilities, reorienting audiences and performers away from the state and towards the morality of the market. I am continuing research on a pending legal case in which nineteen Ghanaians were arrested in Alexandria, Virginia for marriage fraud. I am examining how marriage is used to subvert immigration restrictions, its implications for the legal structuring of sovereign borders, and the changing transnational terms of intimacy.
In 2007 I released a feature documentary film Living the Hiplife, distributed by Third World Newsreel. Screening at various international film festivals in Europe, Africa, and North America, this film focuses on the economic hopes and musical dreams of young Ghanaians as they confront the realities of race, corporate sponsorship, and political change. I am currently working on a new film project that follows Ghana’s national football team on the road to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. I am also in postproduction on several experimental shorts and music videos.