Replacing “Whole Limbs with Borrowed Ones”: Whiteness, Decolonization, and Early Nationalist Identification
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47963/jla.v1i1.83Keywords:
Blinkards, Identification, Nationalism, Postcolonialism, Kobina Sekyi, WhitenessAbstract
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.
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References
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Historical Societies 24.2 (1991). 369–81. Web. 8 June 2014.
“Blinkard.” Oxford English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press, 2014. Web. 3 Aug. 2014.
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Hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics.
Boston: South End Books, 1989. 145–154. Print.
Mbembe, Achille. “African Modes of Self Writing.” Public Culture 14.1: 2002. 239–73. Print.
Osei-Nyame, Kwadwo. “Pan-Africanist Ideology and the African Historical Novel of Self-Discovery: The Examples of
Kobina Sekyi and J. E. Casely Hayford.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 12.2 (1999): 137–153. Print.
Pierre, Jemima. The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2013. Print.
Probst, Peter, Jan-George Deutsch, and Heike Schmidt. “Cherished Visions and Entangled Meanings.” African
Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, eds. Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, Heike Schmidt. New
Hampshire: Heinemann, 2002. 1–17. Print.
Rathbone, Richard. “West African: Modernity and Modernization,” African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current
Debate, eds. Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, Heike Schmidt. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002. 18–30. Print.
Rosenthal, William J. “Lorgnettes.” In Spectacles and Other Vision Aids: A History and Guide to Collecting. San Francisco:
Norman Publishing, 1996. 118–137. Web. 30 April 2018.
Sekyi, Kobina. The Blinkards. London: Heinemann, 1974. Print.
Walters, Ronald. “Pan-Africanism.” Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of
Segregation to the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Paul Finkelman. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Oxford African American
Studies Center. Web. 10 Sep 2015.
Wood, Casey Albert, ed. The American Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Ophthalmology, Vol. 7. Chicago: Cleveland Press,
1915. Web. 30 April 2018.
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Published
2019-12-20
How to Cite
Baker, R. (2019). Replacing “Whole Limbs with Borrowed Ones”: Whiteness, Decolonization, and Early Nationalist Identification. KENTE - Cape Coast Journal of Literature and the Arts, 1(1), 01–14. https://doi.org/10.47963/jla.v1i1.83
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