Books by Carina Ray
Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line... more Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Gold Coasters—their social practices, interests, and anxieties—shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations across racial lines. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its racial and gendered hierarchies of power.
With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame by examining cases in both locales. Intimate relations between black men and white women in Britain’s port cities emerge as an influential part of the history of interracial sex and empire in ways that are connected to rather than eclipsed by relations between European men and African women in the colony.
Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.
This collection of essays by specialists of many different regions of Africa demonstrates the vit... more This collection of essays by specialists of many different regions of Africa demonstrates the vitality and diversity of new research on African maritime history from the pre-colonial era to the post-independence period. In substantiating the important role of Africa in the development of global maritime history, the essays individually and collectively address major issues central not only to African history but also to world history. These include early human migration and the peopling of Africa; early contact between Africans and Europeans; the role of West African maritime communities in the Atlantic slave trade; the exploitation of enslaved Africans’ water-based skills by New World slaveholders; the construction of Atlantic world racial discourses; the rise and fall of colonial rule; and the formation of African immigrant communities in Europe. Equally, the varied and multifaceted approaches taken by the contributors to this volume offer important insights for research on maritime history outside of Africa, especially with regard to maritime labour; the development of navigational technology; swimming, surfing and diving in the Atlantic world; struggles between foreigners and indigenous states over water rights; the close connections between African sailors abroad and at home; the links between transnational maritime labour movements, imperial expansion and decolonization; and the creation and implementation of state regulations on immigration and citizenship. Treat-ing case studies from every major geographical region of the continent, except North Africa, the essays in this volume illustrate that maritime issues are central to the history of the entire continent and are firmly connected to topics of the greatest concern for African historiography.
Published by Memorial University of Newfoundland in its Research in Maritime History series, _Navigating African Maritime History_ includes the following:
Carina E. Ray and Jeremy Rich, “Introduction: Charted Routes and New Directions in the Study of Africa’s Maritime History” / 1
Gwyn Campbell, “Austronesian Mariners and Early Trans-Indian Ocean Crossings” / 19
Margaret Hanzimanolis, “Eight Hens per Man per Day: Shipwreck Survivors and Pastoral Abundance in Southern Africa” / 33
Ousmane Traoré, “State Control and Regulation of Commerce on the Waterways and Coast of Senegambia, ca. 1500-1800” / 57
Kevin Dawson, “Swimming, Surfing and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora” / 81
Jeremy Rich, “Rough Sailing: Risks and Opportunities for Immigrant African Maritime Workers in Gabon, ca. 1860-1914” / 117
Ayodeji Olukoju, “Desertion, Dereliction and Destitution: The Travails of Stranded West African Seamen in the United Kingdom, ca. 1921-1934” / 139
Carina E. Ray, “‘The White Wife Problem:’ Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa” / 163
Henry Trotter, “Sailing Beyond Apartheid: The Social and Political Impact of Seafaring on Coloured South African Sailors” / 189
_Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan_ is a groundbreaking critical reader that brings to... more _Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan_ is a groundbreaking critical reader that brings together many of the leading thinkers and activists involved in understanding and proactively addressing the situation in Darfur and Sudan more generally. The volume is composed of a range of essays that engage in careful analysis of the historical, geo-political, military, social, environmental, and economic roots of the conflict, and reflect on the contemporary realities shaping the experiences of those living in the region. It is our hope that the volume’s cross-disciplinary offerings will foster a comprehensive, yet nuanced understanding of the root causes, manifestations, and implications of the ongoing conflict, and help generate more informed prospects for a just and comprehensive resolution of the conflict.
Published in conjunction with a major international conference held at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University in February 2008, Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan, is composed of two parts:
Part One includes essays by leading Sudanese academics, intellectuals, activists, civil society representatives, and members of government and Darfur rebel factions, along with essays by scholars based in Europe and the United States.
The writers include: Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil, Abaker Mohamed Abuelbashar, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Al-Tayib Zain Al-Abdin, Alex de Waal, Atta El-Batahani, Kamal El Gizouli, Abdullahi Osman El-Tom, Grant Farred, Adrienne Fricke, Fahima Hashim, Salah Hassan, Amira Khair, Mansour Khalid, Mahmood Mamdani, Carina Ray, Karin Willemse, and Benaiah Yongo-Bure. Part One also features a visual essay by Sudanese photographer Issam A. Abdelhafiez.
Part Two reproduces an array of primary and secondary sources, giving readers access to otherwise hard to find documents that chart critical moments in the war in Darfur and the still unfolding efforts to resolve the conflict. These documents include manifestos and proposals by the major Darfuri rebel groups, important United Nations resolutions, and excerpts from _The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in Sudan_, along with an annotated bibliography of the major scholarly works on Darfur.
_Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan_ is essential reading for anyone who is interested in understanding the range of issues that has given rise not only to the war in Darfur, but also the larger interlocking political crisis in Sudan. It also serves as an important indication of the great extent to which Sudanese people, both in Sudan and the diaspora, are engaged in a critical discussion and vigorous activism around the fate of a nation that hangs in the balance.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5595
Journal Articles by Carina Ray
Journal of West African History, 2019
Far from being a salacious footnote in the history of anticolonial nationalist
struggles, the rol... more Far from being a salacious footnote in the history of anticolonial nationalist
struggles, the roles that white women played in the push towards African
independence—as political comrades, friends, and sometimes as lovers or wives to many of the black men who had come to the imperial center to agitate and prepare for independence—were often sustained and meaningful. This article revisits this history—as told in the pages of my book, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana—in order to offer a critique of the skewed
gendered optics of African nationalism produced by the book’s focus on interracial relationships. Although novel in its analysis of the affective
interracial bonds that helped nourish the work of African nationalism in the colonial metropole, the lens of interracial intimacy deployed in Crossing the Color Line keeps African women at the margins of the nationalist narrative, where they have long been relegated despite decades of stellar research on their key roles in mass nationalist movements. In seeking a way out of this conundrum, this article concludes with a call for an affective history of African nationalism that centers intimacies and other forms of solidarity
between African men and women as a means of advancing an integrative approach to nationalism that explores it as a shared project between African men and women rather than a history to which African women must be restored. In so doing this article offers a new model of the review essay for the Journal of West African History, one that invites authors to engage in critical reappraisals of their own published work. What do we learn after the fact of publication about both the contributions and consequences of our research? How can we engage those issues in ways that move beyond purely backwards looking reflection to hale new research agendas?
PMLA, 2016
before it was published as a book. In August of that year the Association for the Study of the Wo... more before it was published as a book. In August of that year the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) held its ith biennial conference in the Ghanaian capital. his was ASWAD's irst conference on the continent, and it drew an impressive array of scholars from all over the world to a country that has long been a focal point of the diaspora's engagement with its African past and present. Because of its location, the conference attracted an especially large contingent of scholars who work on Ghana, among them quite a few historians, including me. Just when it seemed that the atmosphere of intellectual exchange could not get any headier, Quayson invited a small group of us to join him on a bespoke tour of Accra that heralded the arrival of Oxford Street in 2014.
IN THE SUMMER AND FALL of 1919, the African-owned Gold Coast press was awash with news stories an... more IN THE SUMMER AND FALL of 1919, the African-owned Gold Coast press was awash with news stories and impassioned commentary about the postwar race riots that had recently devastated Liverpool, Cardiff, and other major port cities in Britain. Angered by the sexual politics underlying the riots, Gold Coast commentators were quick to point out that the ports' white rioters were not the only ones aggrieved by interracial sexual relations. Atu, a regular columnist for the Gold Coast Leader, responded to news that black men were targeted for repatriation after being attacked on the ports' streets for "consorting with white women" by reminding his readers "that in their own country white men freely consort with coloured women, forming illicit alliances, and in many cases leaving on the coast abandoned offspring to the precarious protection of needy native families." He continued, "It does not require much skill to diagnose the canting hypocrisy underlying" the riots, but the question now was whether "any sensible man [could] suppose that these men will return to their homes to view with complacency the spectacle of white men associated with coloured women." 1 In a few short lines, Atu vivified the "tensions of empire" created by the movement of African men between metropole and colony, and their different systems of raced and gendered sexual access. 2
"Interracial Sex and the Making of Empire" in _A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism_, Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani, editors, Blackwell Publishing, Jun 2013
In an oft-cited and widely critiqued essay, the historian of British empire, Ronald , claimed tha... more In an oft-cited and widely critiqued essay, the historian of British empire, Ronald , claimed that "the expansion of Europe was not only a matter of 'Christianity and commerce,' it was also a matter of copulation and concubinage." To this he added, "Sexual opportunities were seized with imperious confi dence" (p.35). In Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience ( 1990 ), Hyam further developed his contention that the sexual opportunities available abroad to Europe ' s empire builders were more than just a perk of imperial expansion; they were, he boldly claimed, what sustained the large numbers of European men who fanned out across the globe in the service of empire. Freed from repressive Victorian morality codes at home, European men could fulfi ll their libidinous desires with the colonies ' sexually decadent "natives." Hyam ' s explorations of the complex role played by sex in the making of empire are characterized by a marked interest in what interracial sexual relations meant for British men and for imperialism. As one of his critics points out, his "imperialist centered approach" causes him to take "the position of the white male colonialists, imperial administrators and soldiers who staffed the British Empire, and he fails to link his discussion of sex and empire with any analysis of the power relations in the various situations which he describes"; nor does he offer any analysis of the "providers" of sexual opportunity -colonized women and girls, as well as colonized men and boys ( Berger 1988 : 84; for Hyam ' s response to Berger, see Hyam 1988 ; for other critiques, see Strobel 1992 ;. Hyam ' s approach, which perpetuates the erasure of the colonized found in outdated colonial histories, where Europeans, as agents of the "civilizing mission," were the center of attention, is particularly problematic precisely because interracial sexual relation-A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, First Edition. Edited by Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani.
Return is as much about the world to which you no longer belong as it is about the one in which y... more Return is as much about the world to which you no longer belong as it is about the one in which you have yet to make a home. Saidiya Hartman
Popular Publications by Carina Ray
Oxford University Press Blog, Oct 2014
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Books by Carina Ray
With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame by examining cases in both locales. Intimate relations between black men and white women in Britain’s port cities emerge as an influential part of the history of interracial sex and empire in ways that are connected to rather than eclipsed by relations between European men and African women in the colony.
Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.
Published by Memorial University of Newfoundland in its Research in Maritime History series, _Navigating African Maritime History_ includes the following:
Carina E. Ray and Jeremy Rich, “Introduction: Charted Routes and New Directions in the Study of Africa’s Maritime History” / 1
Gwyn Campbell, “Austronesian Mariners and Early Trans-Indian Ocean Crossings” / 19
Margaret Hanzimanolis, “Eight Hens per Man per Day: Shipwreck Survivors and Pastoral Abundance in Southern Africa” / 33
Ousmane Traoré, “State Control and Regulation of Commerce on the Waterways and Coast of Senegambia, ca. 1500-1800” / 57
Kevin Dawson, “Swimming, Surfing and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora” / 81
Jeremy Rich, “Rough Sailing: Risks and Opportunities for Immigrant African Maritime Workers in Gabon, ca. 1860-1914” / 117
Ayodeji Olukoju, “Desertion, Dereliction and Destitution: The Travails of Stranded West African Seamen in the United Kingdom, ca. 1921-1934” / 139
Carina E. Ray, “‘The White Wife Problem:’ Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa” / 163
Henry Trotter, “Sailing Beyond Apartheid: The Social and Political Impact of Seafaring on Coloured South African Sailors” / 189
Published in conjunction with a major international conference held at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University in February 2008, Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan, is composed of two parts:
Part One includes essays by leading Sudanese academics, intellectuals, activists, civil society representatives, and members of government and Darfur rebel factions, along with essays by scholars based in Europe and the United States.
The writers include: Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil, Abaker Mohamed Abuelbashar, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Al-Tayib Zain Al-Abdin, Alex de Waal, Atta El-Batahani, Kamal El Gizouli, Abdullahi Osman El-Tom, Grant Farred, Adrienne Fricke, Fahima Hashim, Salah Hassan, Amira Khair, Mansour Khalid, Mahmood Mamdani, Carina Ray, Karin Willemse, and Benaiah Yongo-Bure. Part One also features a visual essay by Sudanese photographer Issam A. Abdelhafiez.
Part Two reproduces an array of primary and secondary sources, giving readers access to otherwise hard to find documents that chart critical moments in the war in Darfur and the still unfolding efforts to resolve the conflict. These documents include manifestos and proposals by the major Darfuri rebel groups, important United Nations resolutions, and excerpts from _The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in Sudan_, along with an annotated bibliography of the major scholarly works on Darfur.
_Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan_ is essential reading for anyone who is interested in understanding the range of issues that has given rise not only to the war in Darfur, but also the larger interlocking political crisis in Sudan. It also serves as an important indication of the great extent to which Sudanese people, both in Sudan and the diaspora, are engaged in a critical discussion and vigorous activism around the fate of a nation that hangs in the balance.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5595
Journal Articles by Carina Ray
struggles, the roles that white women played in the push towards African
independence—as political comrades, friends, and sometimes as lovers or wives to many of the black men who had come to the imperial center to agitate and prepare for independence—were often sustained and meaningful. This article revisits this history—as told in the pages of my book, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana—in order to offer a critique of the skewed
gendered optics of African nationalism produced by the book’s focus on interracial relationships. Although novel in its analysis of the affective
interracial bonds that helped nourish the work of African nationalism in the colonial metropole, the lens of interracial intimacy deployed in Crossing the Color Line keeps African women at the margins of the nationalist narrative, where they have long been relegated despite decades of stellar research on their key roles in mass nationalist movements. In seeking a way out of this conundrum, this article concludes with a call for an affective history of African nationalism that centers intimacies and other forms of solidarity
between African men and women as a means of advancing an integrative approach to nationalism that explores it as a shared project between African men and women rather than a history to which African women must be restored. In so doing this article offers a new model of the review essay for the Journal of West African History, one that invites authors to engage in critical reappraisals of their own published work. What do we learn after the fact of publication about both the contributions and consequences of our research? How can we engage those issues in ways that move beyond purely backwards looking reflection to hale new research agendas?
Popular Publications by Carina Ray
With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame by examining cases in both locales. Intimate relations between black men and white women in Britain’s port cities emerge as an influential part of the history of interracial sex and empire in ways that are connected to rather than eclipsed by relations between European men and African women in the colony.
Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.
Published by Memorial University of Newfoundland in its Research in Maritime History series, _Navigating African Maritime History_ includes the following:
Carina E. Ray and Jeremy Rich, “Introduction: Charted Routes and New Directions in the Study of Africa’s Maritime History” / 1
Gwyn Campbell, “Austronesian Mariners and Early Trans-Indian Ocean Crossings” / 19
Margaret Hanzimanolis, “Eight Hens per Man per Day: Shipwreck Survivors and Pastoral Abundance in Southern Africa” / 33
Ousmane Traoré, “State Control and Regulation of Commerce on the Waterways and Coast of Senegambia, ca. 1500-1800” / 57
Kevin Dawson, “Swimming, Surfing and Underwater Diving in Early Modern Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora” / 81
Jeremy Rich, “Rough Sailing: Risks and Opportunities for Immigrant African Maritime Workers in Gabon, ca. 1860-1914” / 117
Ayodeji Olukoju, “Desertion, Dereliction and Destitution: The Travails of Stranded West African Seamen in the United Kingdom, ca. 1921-1934” / 139
Carina E. Ray, “‘The White Wife Problem:’ Sex, Race and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa” / 163
Henry Trotter, “Sailing Beyond Apartheid: The Social and Political Impact of Seafaring on Coloured South African Sailors” / 189
Published in conjunction with a major international conference held at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University in February 2008, Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan, is composed of two parts:
Part One includes essays by leading Sudanese academics, intellectuals, activists, civil society representatives, and members of government and Darfur rebel factions, along with essays by scholars based in Europe and the United States.
The writers include: Musa Adam Abdul-Jalil, Abaker Mohamed Abuelbashar, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Al-Tayib Zain Al-Abdin, Alex de Waal, Atta El-Batahani, Kamal El Gizouli, Abdullahi Osman El-Tom, Grant Farred, Adrienne Fricke, Fahima Hashim, Salah Hassan, Amira Khair, Mansour Khalid, Mahmood Mamdani, Carina Ray, Karin Willemse, and Benaiah Yongo-Bure. Part One also features a visual essay by Sudanese photographer Issam A. Abdelhafiez.
Part Two reproduces an array of primary and secondary sources, giving readers access to otherwise hard to find documents that chart critical moments in the war in Darfur and the still unfolding efforts to resolve the conflict. These documents include manifestos and proposals by the major Darfuri rebel groups, important United Nations resolutions, and excerpts from _The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in Sudan_, along with an annotated bibliography of the major scholarly works on Darfur.
_Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan_ is essential reading for anyone who is interested in understanding the range of issues that has given rise not only to the war in Darfur, but also the larger interlocking political crisis in Sudan. It also serves as an important indication of the great extent to which Sudanese people, both in Sudan and the diaspora, are engaged in a critical discussion and vigorous activism around the fate of a nation that hangs in the balance.
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5595
struggles, the roles that white women played in the push towards African
independence—as political comrades, friends, and sometimes as lovers or wives to many of the black men who had come to the imperial center to agitate and prepare for independence—were often sustained and meaningful. This article revisits this history—as told in the pages of my book, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana—in order to offer a critique of the skewed
gendered optics of African nationalism produced by the book’s focus on interracial relationships. Although novel in its analysis of the affective
interracial bonds that helped nourish the work of African nationalism in the colonial metropole, the lens of interracial intimacy deployed in Crossing the Color Line keeps African women at the margins of the nationalist narrative, where they have long been relegated despite decades of stellar research on their key roles in mass nationalist movements. In seeking a way out of this conundrum, this article concludes with a call for an affective history of African nationalism that centers intimacies and other forms of solidarity
between African men and women as a means of advancing an integrative approach to nationalism that explores it as a shared project between African men and women rather than a history to which African women must be restored. In so doing this article offers a new model of the review essay for the Journal of West African History, one that invites authors to engage in critical reappraisals of their own published work. What do we learn after the fact of publication about both the contributions and consequences of our research? How can we engage those issues in ways that move beyond purely backwards looking reflection to hale new research agendas?