Ohio University Press Village Work: Development and Rural Statecraft in Twentieth-Century Ghana (New African Histories)

Review “Village Work provides new, critical perspectives on debates about development in both scholarship and practice. By placing the village at the center of development politics, Wiemers challenges conventional understandings of statecraft and humanizes the development process at all levels, detailing the improvisations and inconsistencies that lay behind the promise of ‘progress.’” -- Jennifer Hart, author of Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation “Village Work offers a sophisticated analysis of small-scale development projects in rural Ghana while bringing visibility to the ‘hinterland statecraft’ of local communities as they navigated the rising developmentalist states in the twentieth century. Deftly written and superbly argued, Wiemers illuminates the ‘useable fictions’ of rural sameness that government and NGO employees operationalized to justify their homogenizing of villages and rural space across Africa.” -- Elisabeth McMahon, coauthor of The Idea of Development in Africa: A History “Village Work is a timely and fascinating multilayered history of development in Ghana. Using the village of Kpasenkpe in northern Ghana as the focus, Alice Wiemers has written a penetrating study of the ‘performance’ of development in Africa from the family unit to the village, national, and international levels.” -- Opolot Okia, author of Labor in Colonial Kenya after the Forced Labor Convention, 1930–1963 Product Description This detailed and groundbreaking history of rural Ghanaian statecraft details the crucial importance that local village development systems have on regional and national scales. About the Author Alice Wiemers is an assistant professor of history at Davidson College. Her work has appeared in the Journal of African History, World Development, and International Labor and Working-Class History.