Carina Ray
Carina Ray is the A.M. and H.P. Bentley Chair in African History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 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) and African Identities: Past and Present (Cambridge University Press), and recently completed a three-year term as editor of Ghana Studies and as a member of the Board of Editors for The American Historical Review.
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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.
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=5595
Journal Articles
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
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.
http://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?