Imagining Futures: Memory and Belonging in an African Family

What keeps a family together? In Imagined Futures, authors Carola Lentz and Isidore Lobnibe offer a unique look at one extended African family, currently comprising over five hundred members in Northwestern Ghana.

The Bemiles, like other families in the region, find themselves living increasingly farther apart and working in diverse occupations ranging from state secretary in the Ministry of Culture to farmer. So what keeps them together as a family? In their groundbreaking work, Lentz and Lobnibe argue that collective memory, and not material interests, bind a family together.

Imagined Futures explores the changing practices of remembering in an African family and offers a unique contribution to the growing field of memory studies, beyond the usual focus of Europe and America. Lentz and Lobnibe explore how, in an increasingly globalized, postcolonial world, memories themselves are not static accounts of past events but are actually malleable and shaped by both current concerns and imagined futures.