Carina Ray

Carina Ray is a scholar of race and sexuality; comparative colonialisms and nationalisms; migration and maritime history; print cultures; bodily aesthetics, and the relationship between race, ethnicity, and political power. Ray’s research is primarily focused on Ghana and its diasporas. She is the author of Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana, winner of the American Historical Association's 2016 Wesley-Logan Book Prize and the African Studies Association's 2017 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. Her articles have appeared in Gender and History, PMLA, The Journal of West African History, and The American Historical Review, among others. She is series co-editor of New African Histories (Ohio University Press) with Jacob Dlamini and Derek Peterson, and African Identities: Past and Present (Cambridge University Press) with Toyin Falola. Ray previously served as series editor of Ohio Short Histories of Africa (Ohio University Press) with Dan Magaziner, Michelle Moyd, and Moses Ochunu; as editor of Ghana Studies; and as a member of the Board of Editors for The American Historical Review.

Ray's current book project, Before the Black Star: A History of Race in Ghana from the Era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Through Independence, puts African-owned newspapers—and the concept of Black print—at the center of the story it tells about the growth of racial consciousness in Ghana long before it emerged as the Black Star of Africa in the middle of the twentieth century. Nearly one hundred years earlier, when British colonization eclipsed African aspirations for self-governance in what was then known as the Gold Coast, members of the African intelligentsia began establishing newspapers as alternative spheres of power and influence. To account for the political and epistemological dimensions of the work undertaken by African-owned newspapers Before the Black Star conceptualizes Black print as both a practice and a theory of the mutually constitutive relationship between racial consciousness and print culture.  Black print was not the only medium for engaging race. Sermons, political speeches, court petitions, public debates, and private letters all provide evidence of the ways that Africans deployed race. But only Black print had the cultural and material capacity to transform individual acts of racial critique into a publicly accessible conversation about race that readers could consult at will, extend, and mobilize.

Ray is also working on a long-term oral history project that explores the sprawling Cuban presence in Cold War-era Africa through the voices of the Cuban women and men who served there. 

Selected Publications:

Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politcs of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio, 2015)

Editor (with Jeremy Rich), Navigating African Maritime History (Liverpool, 2009)

Editor (with Salah Hassan), Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader (Cornell/Prince Claus Fund, 2009)

"Interracial Intimacies and the Gendered Optics of African Nationalism in the Colonial Metropole," (Journal of West African History, 2019)

"Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Colonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast" (AHR, 2014)

Fields of Study:

Africa; West Africa; Ghana

African Diaspora

Race 

Gender and Sexuality

Print Culture