My first book project, Anticolonial Public: The Imperial Encounter and the Political Imagination in Southern Ghana, studies the emergence of an anticolonial movement from below in the area of the Gold Coast Colony. Through changes to human-land relationships, public space, and spatial technologies of statecraft, Anticolonial Public charts the subversive political imagination that emerged among non-elite Gold Coast communities during the era of colonial rule. It argues that, even before the vocabulary of Pan-Africanism would form a catalyzing political language in the 20th century, a decolonization movement emerged from below in southern Ghana. This was an “anticolonial public:” people united by a shared vision of popular sovereignty  and people’s rights as pertaining to the care of the land, custody of public spaces, and ideas of “the public” that predated colonialism.

With chapters on land and power in the Atlantic era, the arrival of the British state, the invention of public cemeteries, state prisons, public sanitation, internal borders, the Age of Destoolment (deposing chiefs), the asafo rebellions, and the cocoa hold-ups, it traces a continuous struggle against colonial state annexations and manipulations. Anticolonial Public suggests that, in the same way that imperialism in Ghana was a multi-century process, so too was the growth of anticolonialism.

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