Dissertation

Policing sexual boundaries: The politics of race in colonial Ghana

Ray, Carina E

2007

Overview

Based on archival research in Ghana and England, this dissertation examines 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 colonial Ghana was then known. The delineation of these boundaries reflected and reinforced, yet often complicated and contradicted the racial politics that underpinned the colonial project in the Gold Coast. The need for these interventionist policies and their unintended and often paradoxical consequences, point to the fact that control over sexual relations in the Gold Coast, 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 over sexual relations wielded by Gold Coasters. Moreover, the ability of Gold Coasters to exploit the disjuncture between official policies on interracial sexual relations and the realities on the ground often allowed them to exercise even greater agency in contesting their subordinate positions within the colonial hierarchy. Thus, whereas the majority of studies on colonial interracial sexual relations tend to focus on the myriad meanings of interracial sex for the colonizer to the exclusion of the colonized, this dissertation breaks away from this one-sided approach by showing how the domain of interracial sexual relations was shaped to a far greater extent than is generally recognized by the social practices and interests of the colonized. This study also moves across the Atlantic to look at interracial sexual relations between Africans and Europeans in the metropole. This shift reveals the great extent to which colonial and metropolitan histories of race mixture were intertwined and mutually shaped by one another. Significantly, these tangled histories offer new insights into the role that interracial sexual relations played in the development of anti-colonial sentiments amongst West Africans. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that the domain of interracial sexual relations in colonial Ghana 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.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: African history / Black history / Gender / Gender studies / History / Modern history
• ISBN: 9798209544371