Black Feminist Ethnography and the Racial Politics of Porter Labor in Ghana

Abstract

AbstractBlack scholars have long been at the forefront of ethnographic accounts of race and racism. Still, ethnicity rather than race is a preferred valence for understanding identity politics in Africa. The marginalization of African and diasporic women's intellectual output on race and gender on the continent contributes to a vision of Africans as perennial subjects and overlooks a rich discourse on global antiblackness and white supremacy. With ethnographic attention to Ghanaian women migrants known as kayayoo/kayayei (head porter[s]), this article draws on the work of Black women scholars – and African feminists in particular—to interrogate the racial politics of gender in Africa. In addition to analyzing the enforcement of class hierarchies, I examine how migrant exclusion at Accra's Makola Market reflects racialized sentiments about rural Ghana that are associated with slavery and colonial sensibilities about modernity. To meet these aims, I draw on somatic praxis of radical listening and haptic experience to demonstrate how affective relationships can productively theorize race and exclusion in Ghana.