Fordham University

Faculty Member, History Department

Assistant Professor

About

I work on Modern African History and am particularly interested in the racial and sexual politics of colonial rule; comparative histories of race mixture in Africa and the African Diaspora; the African Diaspora and reverse migration; and the relationship between race, ethnicity, and political power in post-independence Africa.

My forthcoming book manuscript, _Crossing the Color Line: Interracial Sex and the Contested Politics of Colonial Rule in Ghana_, is centrally concerned with showing how the domain of colonial interracial sexual relations was shaped to a far greater extent by the social practices, interests, and anxieties of the colonized than has generally been recognized by scholars of colonialism. Crossing the Color Line probes a series of interventions made by British colonial and metropolitan authorities during  the first half of the twentieth century that sought to impose sexual boundaries between Africans and Europeans in the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, and to prevent mixed race couples in Britain from taking up residency in British West Africa. The need for these interventionist policies, and their unintended and often paradoxical consequences, point to the fact that control over interracial sexual relations in the Gold Coast and Britain, while central to the colonial project, was never firmly in the hands of Europeans. Rather, these interventions were very much a response to the considerable control Gold Coasters exercised within the domain of colonial interracial sexual relations. 

Based on extensive archival research and oral histories in Ghana and the United Kingdom, _Crossing the Color Line_ illuminates the multiplicity of ways that  interracial sexual relations became a space in which racial, administrative, gendered, and indigenous hierarchies were being constructed, contested, and reordered by a broad range of social actors, both African and European. It also forcefully argues that discontent over the changing nature of interracial  sexual relations was an important vector in rise of interwar anti-colonial nationalism in the Gold Coast. In these ways the book contributes new insights into
the social histories of colonialism and nationalism that should be of interest to scholars of Africa’s social and political history; colonial and post-colonial studies; race, gender and sexuality studies; Diaspora and British empire studies; as well as British history.

My next book project, _Emerging Blackness: A History of Race Making in Colonial and Post-Independence Ghana_, explores popular ideas about the relationship between race, citizenship, and political power in Ghana by using, as a point of entry, the case of the country's former head of state, J.J. Rawlings (1981-2000), who is of Ghanaian (Ewe) and Scottish parentage. By situating Rawlings in the much longer history of the often fluid, but at times contested integration of people of mixed African and European background into both indigenous and colonial political structures, I hope to learn more about how the criteria for defining blackness emerged and changed over the course of the colonial and post-independence periods in conversation with evolving local ideas about who has the right to hold political power and diasporic discourses on racial emancipation.

I teach a range of different African history courses (Understanding Historical Change: Africa; 20th Century African Icons; The African City; Archiving Africa), as well as a seminar called Close Encounters: Interracial Sex in the Colonial World. I am also the author of "Lest We Forget" a monthly column for New African magazine, the oldest Pan-African monthly magazine in print, and co-editor of _Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader_ and _Navigating African Maritime History_. 

Contact Information