Space, Place, and the Colonial State
I am broadly interested in how colonial states operated on the ground. What spatial technologies and political institutions were necessary to materializing a colonial government? What did practices of statecraft (or “space-craft”) look like?
Through a case study of the Gold Coast Colony (present-day Southern Ghana), I have investigated these questions through the examples of state prisons, cemeteries, public sanitation, road-building, public squares, and the destruction of indigenous spiritual landscapes.
In “Placing and Spacing the Dead in Colonial Accra,” I showed how state cemeteries were part of a broader imperial project of transforming urban land into private fungible property by relocating ancestral remains (buried inside the house) into centralized public cemeteries. A journal article version of this essay is forthcoming from The Journal of Social History.
Other essays on the colonization of Accra, the destruction of spiritual landscapes, and public sanitation, are forthcoming.