Ato Quayson is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2019 was elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He is a Professor of English at Stanford.
He studied for his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana and took his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge after which he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford before returning to Cambridge to become Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature in the Faculty of English from 1995-2005. He was also Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Fellow of Pembroke College while at Cambridge. Prior to Stanford he was Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University (2017-2019) and Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto (2005-2017). In 2016 he was appointed University Professor at the University of Toronto, the highest distinction bestowed by the university.
Professor Quayson has published 5 monographs and 8 edited volumes. His monographs include Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997), Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process? (2000), Calibrations: Reading for the Social (2003), and Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (2007). Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014) was co-winner of the Urban History Association’s 2015 Best Book Prize (non-North America) and was named in The Guardian as one of the 10 Best Books on Cities in 2014. His edited books include Relocating Postcolonialism (with David Goldberg, 2001), African Literary Theory: An Anthology of Literary Criticism and Theory (with Tejumola Olaniyan, 2007), Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration (2008), Labor Migration, Human Trafficking, and Multinational Corporations (with Antonela Arhin, 2012), The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), A Companion to Diaspora and Transnational Studies (with Girish Daswani, 2013), and The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (2016). He also wrote a new Introduction and Notes to Nelson Mandela’s No Easy Walk to Freedom (2003). He is currently completing Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature for Cambridge University Press and also working with Grace Tolequé on Accra Chic: A Locational History of Fashion in Accra for Intellect Books and Chicago University Press.
Professor Quayson was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar (1991-1994), Chief Examiner in English for the International Baccalaureate (2005-2007) and member of the European Research Council (2010-2017). He has also held Fellowships at the Du Bois Institute for African American Studies at Harvard (2004), and the Research Centre in the Humanities at Australian National University (2015). He was the 2011-12 Cornille Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College and is founding editor of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. He has lectured widely in Africa, Europe, Canada, the United States, Singapore, Turkey, Hong Kong, Australia, and various other places.
He is currently Vice-President, African Studies Association, and President of the ASA in November of 2019.
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Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism
In Oxford Street, Accra, Ato Quayson analyzes the dynamics of Ghana’s capital city through a focus on Oxford Street, part of Accra’s most vibrant and globalized commercial district. He traces the city’s evolution from its settlement in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. He combines his impressions of the sights, sounds, interactions, and distribution of space with broader dynamics, including the histories of colonial and postcolonial town planning and the marks of transnationalism evident in Accra’s salsa scene, gym culture, and commercial billboards.
Quayson finds that the various planning systems that have shaped the city—and had their stratifying effects intensified by the IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs of the late 1980s—prepared the way for the early-1990s transformation of a largely residential neighborhood into a kinetic shopping district. With an intense commercialism overlying, or coexisting with, stark economic inequalities, Oxford Street is a microcosm of historical and urban processes that have made Accra the variegated and contradictory metropolis that it is today.
“Oxford Street, Accra offers a fresh portrait of a rising African metropolis by one of the most original and skilled critics of the African condition. Deeply researched and packed with detail and bold in scope and analysis, Oxford Street, Accra is a unique addition to the growing body of work on contemporary African Urbanism. This extraordinary book shows the extent to which the future of urban theory might well lie in the global South.” – Achille Mbembe, author of Critique de la raison négre.
KEY SELLING POINTS:
- Oxford Street, Accra is a must-buy as an invaluable companion and compass for both newcomers and returning visitors to Accra.
- Oxford Street, Accra was chosen as one of the ‘UK Guardian’s 10 Best City Books of the World in 2014.’
- Oxford Street, Accra was also the Co-Winner of ‘The Urban History Association’s Top Award in the International Category For Books Published About World Cities in 2013 – 2014.’
- Oxford Street, Accra contains an encyclopedic knowledge of the City of Accra, tracing the city’s evolution from its settlement in the mid-seventeenth century to the present day.
- The book offers a microcosm of historical and urban knowledge of the making of the city that have transformed Accra into the sophisticated metropolis that is it today.
₵160.00