Contemporary African emotional expression is a cultural artifact that has encoded within it the story of colonial and postcolonial history. Through an analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo’s award-winning novel Changes, this article explores how emotions are expressed in contemporary Ghanaian literature. From literal translations of indigenous languages and culturally specific nonverbal communication to Western expressions and locally created neologisms, the contemporary Ghanaian text Changes offers a glimpse into the unique world of Ghanaian emotions—a world that is an interesting mix of the indigenous, Westernization, and time.
Achebe, C. (1973). The role of the writer in a new nation. In G. D. Killiam (Ed.), African writers on African writing (pp. 3-12). London: Heinemann.
2.
Adams, G., & Dzokoto, V. (2003). Self and identity in African studies. Self and Identity, 2, 345-359.
3.
Aidoo, A. A. (1991). Changes: A love story. London: Women’s Press.
4.
Ameka, F. (2002). Cultural scripting of body parts for emotions: On “jealousy” and related emotions in Ewe. Pragmatics and Cognition, 10, 27-58.
5.
Bruner, J. (1992). The narrative construction of reality. In H. Beilin & P. B. Pufall (Eds.), Piaget’s theory: Prospects and possibilities. The Jean Piaget Symposium Series (pp. 229-248). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
6.
Bryce, J., & Dako, K. (2000). Textual deviancy and cultural syncretism: Romantic fiction as a subversive strain in Black women’s writing. In K. Anyidoho & J. Gibbs (Eds.), FonTomFrom: Contemporary Ghanaian literature, theatre and film (pp. 1-22). Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.
7.
Coles, R. (1989). The call of stories: Teaching and the moral imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
8.
Dzokoto, V. (2005). Culture and somatic-focused attention. Unpublished dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
9.
Dzokoto, V., & Okazaki, S. (2006). Happiness in the eye and heart: A comparison of somatic referencing in the emotion vocabularies of two West African emotion lexica. Journal of Black Psychology, 32, 117-140.
10.
Ekman, P. (1972). Universals and cultural differences in facial expressions of emotion. In J. Cole (Ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation (pp. 207-283). Lincoln: University of Nebraska.
11.
Fiske, A. P., Kitayama, S., Markus, H. R., & Nisbett, R. E. (1998). The cultural matrix of social psychology. In D. T. Gilbert & S. T. Fiske (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., pp. 915-981). New York: McGraw-Hill.
12.
Foss, S. K. (1998). Rhetorical criticism: Exploration and practice. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
13.
Gadzekpo, S. K. (1997). History of Ghana since pre-history: A textbook for senior secondary schools. Accra, Ghana: Royal Crown Press.
14.
Gerard, A. (1983). Toward a national history of Ghanaian literature: A case study methodology. In D. Riemenschneider (Ed.), The history and historiography of commonwealth literature (pp. 91-98). Tubingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag.
15.
Geurts, K. L. (2002). Culture and the senses. Bodily ways of knowing in an African community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
16.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by (2nd ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
17.
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5, 100-122.
18.
McWilliams, S. (1999). “Strange as it may seem”: African feminism in two novels by Ama Ata Aidoo. In A. Azodo & G. Wilentz (Eds.), Emerging perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo (pp. 363-372). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
19.
Mesquita, B. (2001). Emotions in collectivist and individualist contexts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 68-74.
20.
Naidoo, J. C., Olowu, A., Gilbert, A., & Akotia, C. (1998). Challenging EuroAmerican-centered psychology: The voices of African psychologists. In W. J. Lonner, D. L. Dinnel, D. K. Forgays, & S. A. Hayes (Eds.), Merging past, present, and future in cross-cultural psychology. Selected papers from the 14th International Congress of the International Association of Cross-Cultural Psychology (pp. 124-134). Lisse, the Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger.
21.
Nfah-Abbenyi, J. M. (1999). Flabberwhelmed or turning history on its head? The postcolonial woman-as-subject in Aidoo’s Changes: A love story. In A. U. Azodo & G. A. Wilentz (Eds.), Emerging perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo (pp. 281-302). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
22.
Ngugi, w. T. o. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. London: James Currey.
23.
Odamtten, V. O. (1994). The art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and reading against neocolonialism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
24.
Opara, C. (1997). Narrative techniques and the politics of gender: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy and No Sweetness Here. In S. Newell (Ed.), Writing African women: Gender, popular culture and literature in West Africa (pp. 137-146). London: Zed Books.
25.
Patton, M. Q (2002). Qualitative research and evaluative methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
26.
Parham, T. A., White, J. L., & Ajamu A. (2000). The psychology of Blacks: An African-centered perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
27.
Petterson, B., & Stewart, A. (1990). Using personal and fictional documents to assess psychosocial development: A case study of Vera Brittain’s generativity. Psychology and Aging, 5, 400-411.
28.
Rohrer, T. (2002). Pragmatism, ideology and embodiment: William James and the philosophical foundations of cognitive linguistics. Aarhus, Denmark: Center for Semiotics, University of Aarhus.
29.
Rutherford, E. M., MacLeod, C., & Campbell, L. W. (2004). Negative selectivity effects and emotional negativity effects in anxiety: Differential attentional correlates of state and trait variables. Cognition and Emotion, 18, 711-720.
30.
Ryan, G. W., & Bernard, H. R. (2000). Data management and analysis methods. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 769-802) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
31.
Scollon, C., Diener, E., Oishi, S., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2005). An experience-sampling and cross-cultural investigation of the relation between pleasant and unpleasant affect. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 27-52.
32.
Scott, R. L., & Brock, B. I. (1972). Methods of rhetorical criticism. New York: Harper & Row.
33.
Shweder, R. A. (1990). Cultural psychology: What is it? In J. Stigler, R. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development (pp. 1-43). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
34.
Spackman, M., & Parrott, W. (2001). Emotionology in prose: A study of descriptions of emotions from three literary periods. Cognition and Emotion, 15, 553-573.
35.
Stake, R. (2003). Case studies. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Strategies of qualitative inquiry (2nd ed, pp. 134-164). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
36.
Uwakweh, P. (1999). Free but lost: Variations in the militant’s song. In A. U. Azodo & G. A. Wilentz (Eds.), Emerging perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo (pp. 333-362). Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
37.
Veenhoven, R. (2005). World database of happiness. Distributional findings in nations. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Erasmus University Rotterdam.
38.
Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1994). The PANAS-X. Manual for the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule-Expanded Form. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
39.
White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: Norton.
40.
Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Talking about emotions: Semantics, culture and cognition. Cognition and Emotion, 6, 285-319.
41.
Zabus, C. (1991). The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of language in the West African Europhone novel. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.
