Crossing the Color Line : Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana

Authors

Carina E. Ray

Files

Series

New African Histories

Description

Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Ghanaians shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its hierarchies of power. With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame to show how intimate relations between black men and white women in the metropole became deeply entangled with those between black women and white men in the colony in ways that were profoundly consequential.

Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases brought against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.

Award(s): Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Fage & Oliver Prize, Wesley-Logan Prize

Copyright Statement

Crossing the Color Line © 2015 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821445396

Publication Date

10-15-2015

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray, Ghana, British Empire, colonialism, interracial relationships, race, gender, power, colonial rule, anticolonial resistance, empire, intimacy, sexuality, West Africa, transatlantic history, nationalism, colonial anxiety, social history, African history, British colonial state

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies | Social History | Women's Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Ray, Carina E., "Crossing the Color Line : Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana" (2015). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 102.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/102