Ato Quayson's Oxford Street, Accra: Tracing Autobiographical Narrative in Analytical Method

Abstract

In his fascinating study of accra, ato quays0n quickly alerts his reader to the idea that one must not separate ways of knowing shakespeare from ways of knowing Accra. “Reading” the city as a literary critic, but much more, Quayson gives a discursive framework to his historical account of the material, social, and esoteric life of the city. Underlying the text is an implicit argument with other prominent accounts of African cities, which take a more utopian view and present these cities as mapping the innovative, exciting, and creative possibilities of urban space for the rest of the world. Quayson's mode of history is explicitly linked to storytelling in a number of ways beyond his disclosure that “[t]he retelling of Accra's story from a more expansive urban historical perspective is the object of Oxford Street” (4). From the start, it is also clear that his approach will utilize a broadly Marxian framework, which is to see (city) space in terms of the built environment as well as the social relations in and beyond it: “space becomes both symptom and producer of social relations” (5). But ultimately Quayson's apprehension of his city is Marxian because it recuperates ideas, desires, and creativity from the realm of the unique or inexplicable, of “genius,” to effectively insert them into various systems of production or into spaces that lack them. In so doing Quayson enhances, not hinders, our appreciation of those forms of innovation. Also Marxian is his employment of the “negative,” which refers to the way he splits apart many of the accepted relations between things in the scholarship on the development of the city, the postcolonial African city in particular, and pushes beyond the evidence of the “booming” or “creative” city. Quayson thus binds a more philosophical method of reasoning to his analysis of urban social relations while he straddles different disciplines. His work is illuminated when we locate a personal impulse, which we will track through the autobiographical narrative, to intervene not just in the ways the city is understood but also in the ways it is actually developing.