Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a key racial project in contemporary Ghana: the interdependent relationship between the trope of whiteness and white positionality.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the mutual constitution of the ideology of whiteness and the positionality of those so racialized as white in postcolonial Ghana. By "whiteness," I mean historical, cultural, and social practices, as well as ideas and codes, which practically and discursively structure the power and privilege of those racialized as white. I argue in this paper that though the white population in Ghana is mostly transient, and white positionality is hardly rigid, whiteness has retained its undisputed, if contested, power of position. I present ethnographic data to demonstrate the ways that whiteness continues to have currency in this nominally black postcolonial African nation. The analysis does not necessarily analyze the group recognized in Ghana as "white people" as such. Rather, it is an attempt to show how whiteness (as trope and physical visual regime) operates in everyday Ghana in the construction of local meanings of race. The ultimate effort is to reveal a clear discourse of race in postcolonial Africa that is articulated through practices that both reflect global economic, political, and cultural hierarchies, and that reinforce white privilege on the local level.