RE-IMAGINING BLACKNESS: GHANAIANS, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AND POSTWAR PAN-AFRICANISM, 1950-1975

This dissertation examines Ghanaian and African Americans’ pursuit of African personality as a guiding principle of Black liberation, development, and a re-imagination of Blackness from 1950-1975. It argues that in the postwar years, African American and Ghanaian intellectuals melded notions of Blackness from the West and Africa to project a new African personality as a tool for reviving Pan-Africanism and a corrective to White supremacist conceptions of Blackness as primitive, traditional, and inferior. This sense of Blackness further served as an alternative path to the bipolar world of Cold War politics. However, unanimism: the idea that a group of people share similar thoughts on an issue, both fueled and undermined advocates’ politics of liberation. Ghanaian and African American intellectuals’ pursuit of this Pan-African ideology was part of a long Black radical tradition to advance Black liberation, challenge western hegemony, revive Pan-Africanism, and re-imagine Blackness. In Ghana, it framed the nation-state building project, while in the U.S., it forced White Americans to renegotiate their relationship with African Americans. The dissertation sheds new light on postwar Pan-Africanism, African Americans’ engagement with Ghana, Blackness, and the impact of Kwame Nkrumah’s African personality project beyond the borders of Africa.