Nate Plageman is an urban historian who specializes in the history of colonial and post-colonial Africa. His research focuses on Ghana and uses social historical approaches, popular music, and written and oral source materials to understand the fluid fabric of Ghanaian urban life. He completed his  PhD. in African History at Indiana University and joined the History Department at Wake Forest in 2008. His research has been funded by Fulbright and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nate’s first book, Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2013), attends to an oft-ignored moment of the week–“Saturday Nights”–and explores how different groups of Ghanaians gathered around the sounds of highlife, the nation’s most dominant genre of popular music for most of the twentieth century. More specifically, it explores how people used music, dance, and forms of sociability to articulate and contest understandings of power, self, and community throughout the period of British colonial rule, the movement towards independence, and the early years of Ghanaian nationhood. Included in Indiana’s “African Expressive Culture” and “New Approaches to Ethnomusicology” series, the book is enhanced with audio and visual material on the Ethnomusicology Multimedia website (https://ethnomultimedia.org)

Nate’s second book-in-progress, State Plans and City Lives: Urban Itineraries and the Making of a West African Town, provides a longitudinal analysis of Sekondi-Takoradi, a small coastal settlement that became Ghana’s principal port and first “planned city.” Following its initial design, the city went through several master plans and near-constant revision at the hands of British (1890-1957) and Ghanaian (1957-70) authorities, but this project uncovers how the city’s rapidly growing population–not just the state– configured the city’s emerging environs. Taking inspiration from recent scholarship that employs ethnographic observation, literary analysis, and cultural theory to examine contemporary African cities from several angles, of multidimensional power relations, and as contexts of intersection, I use a rich mosaic of source materials to consider the interactions between and intersections of state officials’ and different residents’ urban itineraries throughout much of the 20th century. By attending to a wide array of sources and multiple acts of urban imagination and city-building, the book offers a single, but multivocal, narrative about Sekondi-Takoradi’s past.

Education:
B.A.      Saint Olaf College 2000
M.A.      Indiana University-Bloomington 2003
Ph.D.    Indiana University-Bloomington 2008

Academic Appointments:

• Coordinator, African Studies Minor (2016 – present)
• Wake Forest University, Associate Professor (2014-present)
• Wake Forest University, Assistant Professor (2008-2014)

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• HST 105 Africa in World History

While popular imagination suggests that the African continent has been isolated from history and historical events, this course examines Africa and Africans as central to the development of the wider world.  Throughout the duration of the semester, we will analyze how Africans have influenced and were influenced by global events, particularly in the regions of the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and expanding Atlantic World.  Major themes include the emergence and interrelations of early civilizations, the spread of Christianity and Islam, expanding networks of economic exchange, and migration.   After establishing Africa’s centrality to the emergence of the modern world, the class examines how Africans and peoples of African descent experienced and shaped major historical events and periods of the recent past.

• FYS African Expressive Culture as History

This course uses a number of African popular expressive forms—such as music, theater, art, sport, and clothing—to reveal local views and interpretations of historical events during the twentieth century.  Historical sources often relay the perspective of empowered actors (or those in power), but in this course we will examine the views and realities of African citizens who are often “invisible” in broader historical narratives.  More specifically, we will consider the historical perspectives and realities of a wide range of men and women, including musicians, artists, and actors.  As we analyze the ways in which these individuals have represented events of the last 100 years, we will collectively assess culture’s relationship to political, economic, social, and historical change.  More importantly, we will garner a greater understanding of the ways in which Africans have creatively used the resources at their disposal in order to engage with the past, present, and future.

• HST 268 African History to 1870

An overview of African history which examines topics crucial to the foundation and operation of different African societies prior to the beginning of colonial rule. Emphasizes individual case studies and primary source materials to access the diversity and range of pre-colonial African historical experience and varied methodologies historians have used to reconstruct African pasts. (CD)

• HST 269 African History since 1850

An overview of African history which examines topics crucial to African societies’ experiences with the onset, operation, and end of colonial rule. It also explores how some of African history’s best-known recent events, including South African apartheid and the Rwandan genocide, were products of a much longer history. Emphasizes primary source materials to enhance our understanding of Africans’ historical experiences. (CD)

• HST 340 Urban Africa

Examines the dynamism of African cities, with particular emphasis on ordinary people rather than political or economic authorities. Focusing overwhelmingly on the colonial and post-colonial periods, this course’s major topics include the diversity of African cities, colonial visions for urban change, and cities as sites of social transformations, national revolutions, and political impositions. (CD)

• HST 390 Colonial Encounters in the 19th and 20th centuries

This course, a History Department research seminar, centers its attention on colonial encounters in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Focused largely on the dynamics associated with New Imperialism—a period of colonial expansion by European nations, the United States, and Japan that was driven by technological advances, military conquest, and the exploitation of natural resources—it proceeds in two parts. During the first several weeks of the semester, we will collectively frame and engage the topic of colonial encounters, identify our research projects, and hone our research and methodological skills. During the second part of the semester, you will conduct original research on a topic and theme of your choosing, consult a range of primary and secondary sources, and compile and share your findings in oral and written form.

• Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

• Under Contract: State Plans and City Lives: Urban Itineraries and the Making of a West African Town. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Click here for the complete CV.

• “Recomposing the Colonial City: Music, Space, and Middle-Class City Building in Sekondi, Gold Coast, c. 1900-1920.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 22.8 (2020), special issue on Postcolonial Spatialities, edited by Ato Quayson: 1013-1031.

• “Urban Planning Needs to Look Back First: Three Cities in Ghana Show Why” The Conversation: Africa, September 14, 2020, https://theconversation.com/urban-planning-needs-to-look-back-first-three-cities-in-ghana-show-why-144913.
• (with Tony Yeboah and Jennifer Hart) “Architecting a ‘New Normal’? Past Pandemics and the Medicine of Urban Planning,” Nursing Clio, August 18, 2020, https://nursingclio.org/2020/08/18/architecting-a-new-normal-past-pandemics-and-the-medicine-of-urban-planning/
• (with Jesse Shipley) “Praxis, Perspectives, and Methods of Ghanaian Popular Music: A Special Issue in Honor of John Collins.” Ghana Studies 20 (2017): 3-12.

• “Retuning Imperial Intentions: The Gold Coast Police Band, West African Students, and a 1947 Tour of Great Britain.” Ghana Studies 20 (2017): 111-139.
• “A Failed Showcase of Empire?: The Gold Coast Police Band, Colonial Record Keeping, and a 1947 Tour of Great Britain.” African Music 10.2 (2016): 57-77.

• “Music, Dance, and the Study of Africa.” In Oxford Bibliographies in African Studies, edited by Thomas Spear. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

• “The African Personality Dances Highlife”: Popular Music, Urban Youth, and Cultural Modernization in Nkrumah’s Ghana, 1957-1965” in Modernization as Spectacle in Africa, edited by Peter J. Bloom, Takyiwaa Manuh, and Stephan F. Miescher. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014: 244-267.

• “Colonial Ambition, Common Sense Thinking, and the Making of Takoradi Harbor, Gold Coast, c. 1920-1930.” History in Africa 40 (2013): 317-52.

• “Accra is Changing, Isn’t It?: Urban Infrastructure, Independence, and Nation in the Gold Coast’s Daily Graphic, 1954-57.” International Journal for African Historical Studies 43.1 (2010): 137-159.

Click here for the complete CV.