Art, Archives, & African Sovereignty | Buffett First Friday Lunch with Sally Nuamah

The Roberta Buffett Institute hosts a faculty research lunchtime talk series on the first Friday of every month. Faculty members give a half-hour talk intended for a broad, multidisciplinary audience of Northwestern students, faculty and staff, followed by a conversational Q&A. February’s Buffett First Friday Lunch will feature Sally Nuamah, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern’s School of Education & Social Policy. In recent years, Ghana has experienced a rapid expansion of artist-led and artist-owned cultural institutions, catalyzed by the global revaluation and commodification of Black art following 2020. This project examines whether these emergent spaces are constructing liberatory, community-accountable infrastructures that disrupt historical patterns of extraction, or whether they risk reproducing similar inequities under new forms of ownership and control. Focusing on contemporary sites of portraiture, literature, and music across Accra, Kumasi, Tamale, and Ho, the study combines ethnographic observation, institutional analysis, and qualitative interviews to investigate how questions of sovereignty, gender, and labor are negotiated within Ghana’s evolving cultural ecosystem. In doing so, it interrogates whether contemporary cultural production in Ghana enables new forms of collective sovereignty or reconstitutes extractive political economies under the banner of artistic autonomy. Doors open at 12:00 p.m., and lunch begins at 12:15 p.m. Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated.