Returnees and Change-Making: Entrepreneuring new Narratives, Aesthetics, and Places in Ghana’s Creative Industries

This dissertation explores how entrepreneurial Ghanaian returnees articulate and enact change through their ventures in Accra’s creative industries. Situated against the background of shifting global imaginaries of Africa and within the postcolonial cultural landscape of Accra, it examines how returnees approach and engage in change-making not as ‘development’ projects but as cultural initiatives. Mobilizing concepts of entrepreneuring-as-emancipation, world-making, and place-making, the dissertation illuminates how returnees craft new narratives, aesthetics, and places of belonging that challenge enduring colonial legacies while negotiating their unique positionality as people who are class-privileged in Ghana yet racially marginalized in Euro-American contexts. Based on six months of qualitative fieldwork in Accra, including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and collection of visual data, the dissertation traces how returnees’ entrepreneurial initiatives affirm cultural agency while negotiating tensions between cultural authenticity and market demands, heritage and modernity, and ultimately between critique and complicity. The dissertation advances a contextualized understanding of entrepreneuring as a situated, relational, and tension-ridden process, challenging conventional framings of returnees as ‘agents of development’ by theorizing returnee-driven change as an ongoing effort to reclaim cultural agency to reimagine African futures.