FEBRUARY 23 African Studies Workshop (ASW)
Speaker: Nana Osei-Opare, Assistant Professor of African and Cold War History, Rice University.
Title: Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War Projects
Bio: Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor at Rice University. He is the author of Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War Projects (Cambridge, 2025) and co-edited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World (Bloomsburg, 2024) with Su Lin Lewis. In addition, with Sunnie Rucker-Chang, he coedited a recently published journal special issue on “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies,” in the Slavic Review. Previously, he was a National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation Fellow at the Schomburg Center and received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He has published articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History, and the Journal of West African History, as well as popular pieces in The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, and Foreign Policy Magazine.
Abstract: Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black socialist state. Utilizing materials from Ghanaian, Russian, English, and American archives, Nana Osei-Opare offers a provocative and new reading of this defining moment in world history through the eyes of workers, writers, students, technical-experts, ministers, and diplomats. Osei-Opare shows how race and Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom.
If you are in Cambridge/Boston, we encourage you to join us in the Seminar Room at the Center for African Studies. If you are joining us virtually, please register here on Zoom.
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