New paper: Hegemony by Adaptation. Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry
Comparative Studies in Society and History (2024), 1-34
This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War
October 8, 2024
New paper: Race, Time, Architecture. Dilemmas of Africanization in Ghana, 1951-1966
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 83:2 (2024), 191-208
This article discusses the Africanization of architectural labor in Ghana during the late colonial and early postindependence periods (1951–66). It focuses on the state-supported emergence, advancement, and emancipation of Indigenous architects and institutions in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. Using archival materials held in Accra, Kumasi, and London, the article shows how professionals and administrators negotiated between their double obligations: to fast-track governmental development plans and to Africanize the Public Works Department and its successors. These decision makers addressed temporal dilemmas concerning recruitment, standards, allocation, and racialization of architectural labor. In so doing, they redefined both colonial-era racial categories and racialized Cold War imaginaries of who counted as an African and who counted as an Other. This study advances the architectural history of postcolonial Ghana and broadens the debate about racialization of architecture beyond North America and Western Europe.
September 10, 2024