Carina Ray’s scholarship was sparked by her personal experiences |
Carina Ray’s scholarship was sparked by her personal experiences
Brandeis Now
Brandeis University
Waltham, Massachusetts
2016-02-01
Jarret Bencks, News and Communications Specialist
 Carina Ray performs research in the national archives in Ghana. |
The newest AAAS professor will begin teaching courses next semester
When Carina Ray was an undergraduate at University of California at Santa Cruz in 1993, she was drawn to study abroad in Ghana because she wanted to connect with her Puerto Rican family’s African roots. The trip ended up being the beginning of a career dedicated to the study of what blackness means in West Africa.
Fast-forward to 2016, and Ray is a groundbreaking scholar of African history whose work is shedding new light on the history of race in Africa. She has been appointed as an associate professor of African and Afro-American Studies at Brandeis and will begin teaching courses in the fall of 2016.
Back in 1993, Ray was initially surprised that most Ghanaians she met saw her as white. Her longwinded explanations about being multiracial failed to persuade people otherwise.
“I realized it was more instructive to listen to Ghanaians talk about their own perceptions of blackness and how race works there.”
She found the subject was rarely written about from an African perspective, and that led her to pursue a PhD in African History at Cornell University followed by a robust teaching and publishing career devoted to a deeper understanding of race in Africa.
Out of that search for meaning came Ray’s first book, “Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana,” which cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century. The book has already received praise from noted scholars, including philosopher Kwame Appiah and historian Antoinette Burton…
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