On Cynicism: Activist and Artistic Responses to Corruption in Ghana

Abstract

By considering how Ghanaian activists and artists engage with different forms of cynicism in their attempts to fight corruption, this article reflects on two kinds of activist orientations: one located in future‐oriented projects of political change, and another embracing contradiction by poking fun at the duplicity of politics. I argue that while the cynicism of other middle‐class Ghanaians served as an important catalyst for activist action, it is important to look at cynicism and its politics from the perspective of Ghanaians who become disappointed and skeptical about change and artists who are concerned with embracing contradictions and making fun of the present through satire. By attending to the social actions and experiences that characterize these two groups, I ask what it means to take cynicism, and activism against and despite cynicism, as one's ethnographic object.

Of bakeries and checkpoints: Stately affects in Amman and Baghdad

“…How can this infrastructure “work” when so many others do not? Like Navaro (2002), I wish to emphasise that cynicism does not prevent my interlocutors from trying to will for themselves and their families a better life, against “all odds and chances” (170; see also Allen, 2014; Daswani, 2020). But to ignore such cynical sentiments in the search for resisters and revolutionaries, for example, is to overlook the mundane practices and encounters through which the state permeates everyday life (Martínez and Eng, 2017; Painter, 2006; Steinmüller, 2016).…”

In Mourning: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2020

“…Equally salient is the political potential unearthed by peoples and groups similarly interpellated by security regimes waging tactical disorder. This is not necessarily achieved through the exertion of countervailing violence but instead can take the form of "unarmed militancy," as in Bolivia (C. Bjork-James 2020); cynical humor in Ghana (Daswani 2020); or in the case of Indigenous struggles in Chile and Mexico, the refusal of the premises of law itself out of a commitment to manifest alternative political horizons (Hale 2020;Mora 2020). Even when the exertion of violence is not featured in the tactical approach, to pursue a life out of the terms of order is to be legible by the state as a potential threat to national security.…”

On Cynicism and Citizenship: The Place of Negative Affects in US Antihighway Activism

“…By contrast, Stephanie Savell (2015) draws not on European philosophy but on Latin Americanist scholarship to show how “informal” Brazilian community organizers express cynicism with regards to the leaders of formal civic institutions in order to distance themselves from accusations of corruption and illegitimacy, even as they, at times, make use of the same institutional resources as the formal leaders they criticize. Different definitions of cynicism may also figure in the same analysis—as when Girish Daswani (2020) distinguishes between Ghanaian middle‐class activists and satirical artists based on their divergent uses of cynicism. While the former organize against what they perceive as widespread cynicism among their nonactivist counterparts—only to reproduce neoliberal notions of citizenship, politics, and the future—the latter eschew future‐orientated activist projects so as to poke fun at the duplicity of politics and the political class in the context of Ghana's postcolonial present.…”

“…Cynicism has thus emerged in the hands of anthropologists as a multifaceted and, at times, slippery object (Roudakova 2017, 160–64). Yet a trend does emerge within this literature insofar as it tends to focus on cynicism as an engine of social or political differentiation—of citizen and state (Navaro‐Yashin 2002); of sectarian political formations (Hermez 2015); of “formal” and “informal” community organizers (Savell 2015); or of middle‐class activists and satirical artists (Daswani 2020). My aim is neither to discount these insights nor to offer a more precise definition of what counts as cynicism (cf.…”