American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era

Kevin K. Gaines. American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiv + 342 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Cloth.

African studies and African American studies used to be separate fields. Recently, however, a new stream of studies has emphasized their interconnections, as exemplified in such books as Rising Wind (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), Race Against Empire (Cornell University Press, 1997), Black Rice (Harvard University Press, 2001), Middle Passages (Penguin Press, 2006), and Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Kevin Gaines's American Africans in Ghana now counts itself as a distinguished part of this literature.

After a pair of broad chapters introducing the Ghanaian context and international Afro-diasporic thought from 1900 to 1950, Gaines's book focuses most intensely on the period from March 1957 (when independent Ghana under Nkrumah galvanized the entire African and Afro-diasporic world) to February 1966 (when Nkrumah, while visiting China, lost power in a coup). With these...