In Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah's Symbolic Nationalism, Harcourt Fuller provides an expansive vision of the symbolism of Ghana in the post-liberation period. Written in a clear and accessible tone, richly and historically grounded, backed by fieldwork and archival research, the book addresses the pivotal postcolonial/liberation-era ascendancy of the Ghanaian president and pan-African leader, Kwame Nkrumah. Fuller's work offers a straightforward and well-considered discussion of the ways in which the newly liberated nation was constructed through art and visual culture – what he terms ‘politically inspired signs and symbols’ (p. 12). Fuller's text is free of theoretical jargon, and contains a refreshing focus on African intellectual leadership.

Fuller's account of the employment of ‘symbolic nationalism’ – the merging, that is, of political ideology and nation-building through art – adds to a little-addressed area of study, the theoretical lacunae between so-called ‘traditional’ art and contemporary African art. As Anthony Appiah has argued, most of the nations of Africa did not experience the extended historical era of modernism justifying the employment of the term ‘postmodern’; African art history frequently leaps to address contemporary art without acknowledging its transitional era. Fuller's text addresses this era, emphasizing the crucial role played by Nkrumah in the Organization of African Unity, pan-Africanism, and African nationalism. Throughout much of the continent, as in the diaspora, pan-Africanism had a formative influence upon the arts; the employment of art by its leaders, with the exception of Jean Allman's discussion of the Asante National Liberation Movement (NLM) and my own work, has been little addressed.

Fuller acknowledges the existence of multiple nationalisms within newly liberated former colonies and the competing national symbols offered by the United Gold Coast Convention and NLM, addressed in Allman's scholarship. His detailed discussion of the Ghanaian national anthem, the postage stamps of Nkrumah-era Ghana, and the economic context and political history of liberation-era currency design is a welcome extension of my earlier discussion of the topics. Of particular value is his analysis of the relationship between Nkrumah and fellow pan-Africanist leaders, as well as an extended discussion of his coup, exile, subsequent leaders of Ghana, and the circumstances of his death. Readers who are unfamiliar with this aspect of Ghanaian art history, and the critical, transitional era of liberation, are presented with an accessible, well-organized, and richly documented account of a complex and important history.

Of concern, however, is Fuller's failure to credit adequately the extensive body of work in which I addressed precisely the same thesis and issues: political ideology, nation-building, and art in the Nkrumah era. Fuller's statement that ‘scholars have yet to seriously examine the extent to which symbolic nationalism played a significant role in the contested nation-building process in Ghana during and after the Nkrumah years’ (p. 9) will come as a surprise to those who have read my work in African Studies Review, Africa Today, African Arts, and my book, Art and Architecture in Postcolonial Ghana (McFarland, 2006), which explored the connection between art and architecture and what I termed, variously, ‘ephemeral and transitional art’ and nation-building in Nkrumah-era Ghana, as well as Tanzania and South Africa. That text, written under the guidance of Suzanne Blier and Anthony Appiah, argued for the nation-building role of Ghana's national flag, anthem, coat of arms, postage stamps, currency, and textiles; its National Museum, Independence Arch in Black Square, iconic statues of Nkrumah, and the re-erection (the ‘resurrection’, as I first termed it, as Fuller here does) of the statue, as well as the construction of the Kwame Nkrumah National Park and its statues, mausoleum, and museum, in the context of resistance by the NLM. Fuller returns to all of these subjects, as if for the first time, advancing the same arguments with respect to nation-building and the consolidation of power in the face of regional challenges, even discussing and reproducing in his text many of the same examples of Nkrumahist iconography.

Fuller's text stands as a valuable expansion of the thesis and particulars I advanced, offering an accessible presentation of Nkrumah's critical place within pan-Africanism, as well as a rich discussion of the nation following the coup. His text expands upon certain areas of visual art that both Allman and I previously examined (although he excludes architecture, a pivotal aspect of Nkrumah-era symbolic nationalism, performance art, and public ephemera). Less concerned with establishing the legitimacy of visual culture, an uncertain realm when my work emerged, he discusses nationalist emblems with clarity. The works that first advanced the thesis of symbolic nationalism in Ghana, however, Allman's The Quills of the Porcupine: Ashanti Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana and my own work on the subject, must be acknowledged as groundbreaking.