Carina Ray

"Before the Black Star: A History of Race in Ghana from the Era of the Slave Trade Through Independence"

Before the Black Star 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 illuminate the political and epistemological dimensions of the work undertaken by African-owned newspapers Before the Black Star conceptualizes Black print as a discursive and curatorial practice deployed by these newspapers and as a theory of print culture’s formative role in shaping racial consciousness in Ghana. 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, challenge, extend, and mobilize for myriad purposes. Through their circulations of Black print, African-owned newspapers reveal a late nineteenth-century West African epistemology of blackness that stretched beyond its elite (primarily) Afro-European origins as literacy rates grew, newspaper publishing expanded, and the language of race became a politically consequential medium in the twentieth century that enabled dissent and shaped how Africans in the colony’s growing public sphere debated and fought for political futures defined not by their colonizers, but by themselves.

Carina Ray is Associate Professor of History.