The Chronopolitics of Quantification: Economic Planning, Financial Auditing and Political Theology in 1960s Ghana
Seminar
November 12, 2024
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning: Commons
2000 Bonisteel Blvd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Time: 1:15pm-3:45pm
Location: Room 3146 A&AB
Dr. Gerardo Serra (Lecturer in Economic Cultures, University of Manchester), will discuss his paper "The Chronopolitics of Quantification: Economic Planning, Financial Auditing and Political Theology in 1960s Ghana," which reconstructs the role of development planning and financial auditing in shaping political iconographies in 1960s Ghana. In it, Serra suggests that these tools (and the numbers contained in them) did not simply inform and support practices of economic management. Instead, they contributed to the construction of alternative versions of postcolonial utopianism. The focus is on the last years of Nkrumah’s government, until he was overthrown by a military coup d’état in 1966, and on the brief experience of the National Liberation Council (NLC), the military junta that ruled over Ghana between 1966 and 1969 (and which remains one of the least studied periods in the country’s postcolonial history).
Seen through this lens, the Nkrumaist Seven-Year Plan for National Reconstruction and Development and the financial audits produced by the NLC’s numerous commissions of inquiry embody attempts to build, through numbers, alternative forms of secular eschatology. It is argued that tools like development plans and financial auditing, whose main task is not that of measuring time but are grounded in an idea of linear and homogeneous time, created in 1960s Ghana qualitatively different ‘regimes of historicity’.
But these become visible only when we reconstruct how these ‘dry’ and technical documents were negotiated, contested, and recast in the public sphere. This is achieved primarily by following the iconography of economic numbers in the daily press (with particular emphasis on the Accra Evening News, which often contained some of the most systematic and imaginative representations). Drawing on archival evidence gathered in Accra, Cape Coast, Ho and Washington DC, and informed by ethnographies of planning and social studies of accounting, the paper calls for a more expansive view on what is ‘political’ about economic numbers in the postcolony.
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