Drawing on his new book, Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation, Konadu’s talk will use the story of healer and blacksmith Kofi Dɔnkɔ, and the interlaced evolution of his kin, community, and culture, to explore the critical themes of colonialism, nationalism and decolonization in Ghana and the wider world. Through an approach called communography, Konadu interweaves Dɔnkɔ’s life and community with the history of Gold Coast/Ghana and broader patterns in world history.
Talk based on Our Own Way in This Part of the World: Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation, presented at the African Studies Seminar, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford, October 22, 2020.
Talk at Michigan State University’s African Studies Center, its “Eye on Africa” series, January 20, 2020. This book talk focused on major themes in Our Own Way in This Part of the World, where I center a healer’s life story and experiences in a communography of his community and nation from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth, shaped by historical forces from cocoa booms to decolonization and political and religious parochialism. Touching the lives of so many, this healer’s memory persists in his intellectual and healing legacy, and the story of his community offers a non-national, decolonized example of social organization structured around spiritual forces, serving as a powerful reminder of the importance for us to take our cues from the lived experiences and ideas of the people we study.
Talk at Vanderbilt University, October 2016
Entitled, "The Blacksmith's Tool is Medicine: Healing Africa and our World," this talk took its cue from a recently completed book of an indigenous healer, blacksmith and farmer from twentieth century Ghana, through which I critically examine, more broadly, major roadblocks on Africa's path to prosperity and full human development.
Presentation at an international symposium, CUNY Graduate Center, March 2015
This talk reconstructs the identity of a “liberated” African Muslim captured in early 19th century southern Senegambia, shipped on a Portuguese slaver to Cuba and the Bahamas, and then whose life faded into obscurity.
An audio interview with Ari Barbalat of New Books in African Studies (New Books Network) on the book, Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal's African Empire (London and New York: Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2022).
An audio interview with Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia of New Books in African Studies (New Books Network) on the book, Our Own Way in This Part of the World Biography of an African Community, Culture, and Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
An audio interview with Marshall Poe of the New Books in History (New Books Network) on the book, Transatlantic Africa, 1440-1888 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
An audio interview with Vershawn Young of the New Books in African American Studies (New Books Network) on the book, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).