Replacing “Whole Limbs with Borrowed Ones”: Whiteness, Decolonization, and Early Nationalist Identification

Abstract

In this essay, I center an examination of the satirical play “The Blinkards,” written by Kobina Sekyi in 1915 in the context of British colonization of the Gold Coast in West Africa, present-day Ghana. I show that postcolonial modes of identification emerged within the conceptual framework of cultural nationalism. As such, I argue that emergent postcolonial practices of identification are grounded in transnational modes of modernity. My examination of a selection of Sekyi’s texts shows how whiteness structures oppositional self-making practices within a colonial context, positioning whiteness itself as a key ground of transnational subject positions that develop in modernity.