Interracial Marriage and the Gendered Optics of African Nationalism in the Colonial Metropole

How visible is the role African women played in decolonization? The roles that white women played in the push toward independence—as political comrades, friends, and sometimes as lovers and wives to many of the Black men who had come to the imperial center to agitate for independence—were often sustained and meaningful. They are far from being a salacious footnote in the history of anticolonial nationalist struggles. Yet, this talk explores that affective history and the ways in which it skews the gendered optics of African nationalism by further obscuring the role of African women in the decolonization process.

Carina Ray is associate professor of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University and a historian of Africa and the Black Atlantic world; she holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She is the author of Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2015) and coeditor of Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader (Cornell, 2008). Her current research explores the development of indigenous ideas about blackness and the black body in precolonial and colonial Ghana within local, regional, and transnational networks of exchange and knowledge production.