The Predicament of Blackness: postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race by Jemima Pierre (review)

As an academic living in and writing on South Africa, I am often entangled in conversations about race. Whiteness, my own and others’, and blackness, of various forms and with various definitions, structure everything from my research to my casual everyday interactions. Race can feel inescapable in South Africa. Travelling in other parts of this continent, and elsewhere in the global South, I have been struck by the way in which race is seldom spoken aloud even as it clearly plays a role in social relations and collective imaginings.

Jemima Pierre’s excellent book argues that race impacts just as importantly on culture, politics and lived experience elsewhere in Africa as it does in the South. The Predicament of Blackness is motivated by the urge to highlight the critical failure of thinking that race does not really matter in a context with a majority black population. She makes a strong case for ‘recognising postcolonial African societies as structured through and by global White supremacy’ (p. 1).

The book is at its best during Pierre’s analyses of her well-chosen case studies. Discussing ‘development Whites’ and ‘Peace Corps Whites’, the two main stereotypes of whiteness evinced by international visitors to Accra, she writes that expat spaces equate to a ‘local articulation of a historical global political economy of race and power’ (p. 71). Far from being unique, out of place or irrelevant, tropes of whiteness within Ghana are part of much larger global racial forms. An upper-class black Ghanaian ‘has to perform his status in order to be read as upper class’ (p. 86), whereas a white visitor – even one wearing sandals, a backpack and local clothing – automatically retains access to status on the basis of an unshiftable white positionality, as a consequence of the ‘transnational significance of race’ (p. 103). This argument is reinforced later in the book when Pierre describes the complex relations between black Ghanaians and black diaspora visitors, especially African Americans. These are particularly important with regards to Ghana’s placement within histories of slavery, which are most commonly figured as being ‘owned’ by the black diaspora, with Africa defined as an originary location rather than as a space that was also implicated in and marked by slavery, and suffered considerably as a result of it.

Pierre offers convincing and often moving descriptions of her own experiences as a Haitian-American researcher in Ghana – of, for example, uncomfortable socializing at expat bars in Accra (p. 70), attending state-sponsored heritage tourism events in the slave sites of Elmina and Cape Coast (p. 138), and quizzing Ghanaian interlocutors about their uses of and feelings towards skin-lightening products (p. 103). She locates her arguments appropriately within a historical context, suggesting that, in postcolonial Ghana, white power and privilege remained mostly intact as part of a global system of racialization, while ‘Pan-Africanism and African racial self-determination served as ideological and cultural, but ultimately ineffective, responses’ (p. 39) to the larger problematics of white power. A chapter on the historical political economy of the country is too lengthy: a briefer description would have easily sufficed to make the point about the historical embeddedness of these racial formations and how much they owe to the processes of colonization and decolonization and an always somewhat ambiguous postcoloniality.

The final major chapter of the book deals with the failings of African studies and diaspora studies emerging from the global North to properly account for Africa as a place that is both modern and an important part of the discursive relations of race and power that characterize the contemporary world as a whole. Pierre’s arguments here are powerful – she shows clearly how the ‘culture-ethnic framework’ common to scholarly work on Africa ‘upholds an essentialist (and racialist) African difference’ (p. 202) – but also problematic in terms of the...