Osei Alleyne, assistant professor of media studies and production at the Klein College of Media and Communication, was destined to do research in Ghana.
“My Trinbagonian parents inadvertently gave me the birth name Osei, which happens to be the name of the founding father of the Ashanti people of Ghana,” he explains. “Throughout my life, I have come across Ghanaians who have marveled that I am not myself Ghanaian.”
Although he had planned to do work among communities in Canada, Trinidad or Jamaica when he first began a joint PhD in Anthropology and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, he quickly found himself pulled toward what he describes as “the most welcoming space in the [African] continent.”
The research process for what would become his upcoming book, Dancehall Diaspora: Rastafari & Rudeness in the African Postcolony, began in 2013. Once in Ghana, he drew from his long experience as a touring Hip hop and Spoken Word artist to connect to the local hybrid Ghanaian Hip hop culture known as Hiplife. He also noticed, however, a brewing Jamaican-inspired Reggae-Dancehall scene in Accra that would eventually usurp Hiplife and become a central subject of the book.
In his work, Alleyne engages in multi-modal ethnography, “which presses beyond traditional participant-observation to engage in collaborative composition, recording, performing and music video-making (cinematography and direction) with artists in Ghana.”
As part of the process, he has performed for a crowd of 4,000 at the Chale Wote Festival in Accra and at other smaller events—experiences he details in the book.
“Suffice it to say that failures, misfires and near-misses otherwise disruptive to a fully realized musical performance generate perhaps richer insights for an ethnography,” he notes.
The distance between Philadelphia and Accra was a continuing challenge in the 13 years he spent conducting research for the book.
“While the internet and social media do much to bridge this gap,” he explains, “There is still nothing like being bodily immersed in the space—to be constantly at concert events and the like.”
But the distance also pushed him to further delve into what was happening in digital spaces and into the literature about these spaces. This allowed him to discover some of the “veterans, the up-and-coming and the unsung heroes” of diasporic Dancehall culture that, he argues, are more interesting to anthropologists than the better-known figures.
His position as a researcher also gave him the freedom, when in the field, to make music and film without the stress of having to compete in the space as a striving musician might, and the luxury to “fly under the radar” as just an observer.
After all this time spent researching the culture, Alleyne says he still marvels at the deeply layered diasporic fabric between Jamaica and Ghana. Seeing identity as “always in the making,” his research champions rootlessness—or “routes” rather than “roots”—while recognizing Blackness and African descent as central to the diasporic experience.
Alleyne will further discuss his book and research process in a Graduate Speaker Series event on Monday, February 23 in Annenberg Hall, Mind Lab Room 1H.