The Ghana Studies Association (GSA) in collaboration with Africa is A Country  is excited to announce the first in a series of digital scholarly panel conversations that showcase the most exciting rising scholars and new research.

April 9, 2021

1-3pm EST/5-8pm GMT 

digital and format details to follow

Rethinking Black Internationalism: New Directions in Historical Radicalism

This panel explores how scholarship is reframing black internationalism. Each panelist is conducting meticulous, empirical research on the spaces and peoples in and around Gold Coast-Ghana to challenge established categories of analysis. These historians are working with flexible concepts of mobility and placemaking to show the ways that radical actions and voicings have often been obscured or unrecognized. Their work pushes us to reconsider the methods and practices for conceptualizing Ghana not just as a nation-state but as a centering theoretical node for understanding globalization, political-economy, geography, race, gender, power, urban and domestic space, borders, the role of the intellectual, and various social practices usually understood as geographically bounded. This conversation connects specific research projects to broader questions of how as intellectuals we untangle experiences that, at first glance, appear to be about intimate locality but are also tied to broader radical practices, internationalisms, and forms of power crucial to the present.

Panelists: 

Sarah Balakrishnan, University of Virginia

Bright Gyamfi, Northwestern University

Hermann W. von Hesse, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Marius A. Kothor, Yale University

Moderator: 

Jesse Weaver Shipley, Dartmouth College