Browsing by Author "Balakrishnan, S"

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9

Open Access
Afrocentrism Revisited: Africa in the Philosophy of Black Nationalism
(Souls, 2020-01-02) Balakrishnan, S
Open Access
Afrocentrism: a Perspective of Positive Development Among Black Youth
(Journal of Applied Youth Studies, 2023-10-01) Lateef, H; Balakrishnan, S
Afrocentrism is a perspective wherein phenomena, ideas, events, and cultures that influence the lives of people of African descent are centered within the epistemologies of the African descent communities. Afrocentrism as a socialization mechanism for youth has been increasingly endorsed by African descent communities globally but remains nascent within youth studies literature on adolescent development. The omission of Afrocentrism as a perspective on youth development represents an oversight of culturally responsive, anti-racist research with African-descent youth populations. This conceptual article revisits Afrocentrism as a perspective to envision healthy development of Black youth. In doing so, the authors propose that positive development among Black youth intersects not only with the reality of youth developmental universalisms and race-related concerns, but also that Africanness and associated philosophical underpinnings, as will be described, are central to their healthy development. Historical, theoretical, and findings from exemplar Afrocentric programs are presented, with implications for future scholarship.
Open Access
Archives in Stone: Cemeteries, Burial, and Urban Ownership in Late Colonial Ghana
(Journal of Urban History, 2024-01-01) Balakrishnan, S
While many scholars have examined the influence of European law, writing, and record-keeping on African land rights and property, few have analyzed semi-textual records such as cemetery gravestones. This essay argues that urban cemeteries, introduced by the British colonial state to the Gold Coast Colony (southern Ghana) in the nineteenth century, became archives in stone. As one of the few public records forums available inside Gold Coast towns, cemeteries offered basic, but crucial, information. They indirectly dated immigration history and reflected ancestral political status. Over the course of colonial rule, Gold Coast citizens petitioned the state to have their elders buried in particular cemeteries to augment their claims to land and authority. This essay demonstrates that urban ownership—the status of belonging to a town as an authochthon—came to depend partly upon cemetery burial. Like any archive, cemeteries were highly curated collections, shaping legal contestations over residency, leadership, and land ownership.
Open Access
Building the Ancestral Public: Cemeteries and the Necropolitics of Property in Colonial Ghana
(Journal of Social History, 2022-09-01) Balakrishnan, S
Abstract This essay studies changes to mortuary practices in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana) beginning with the British state’s creation of town cemeteries in the late nineteenth century. It argues that the colonial state enforced cemetery burial because they realized Gold Coast people would never sell their land if it contained the remains of their elders; cemeteries were therefore a crucial tool in the transformation of land into private property for state dispossession. However, the invention of cemeteries had a significant impact on how communities worshipped, and conceived of, ancestral spirits. By gathering ancestors from the various households into a single site, the graveyard created an “ancestral public,” a community of ancestors who protected the community collectively. Their invention changed Gold Coast communities’ relationship to spirits, the afterlife, and property. What ensued were political contestations over rightful burial places, mortuary authority, and what will be called “the necropolitics of property”—the decision of who could, or who could not, enter the afterlife, and what consequences this had for estates.
Open Access
Imperial policing and the antinomies of power in early colonial Ghana
(International Journal of African Historical Studies, 2020-01-01) Balakrishnan, S
In the nineteenth century, constabulary officers in the British Gold Coast were emancipated slaves purchased for conscription. From 1870 to 1900, British officials bought enslaved men of “Hausa” origin, hailing from the Northern territories and the Niger hinterland. In Britain’s eyes, Hausas constituted a venerable “martial race,” ideal for policing. But to local communities, they were an ethnic group known for their enslaved past. This essay reassesses dynamics of policing and imprisonment in the colony through the histories of slavery and abolition. It argues that one result of Britain’s recruitment practices was that police wanted to escape the colonial state as much as the convicts under their care. The colonial prison was riven by a phenomenon of mutual escape. These conditions formed the antinomies of power in early colonial Ghana.
Open Access
OF DEBT AND BONDAGE: FROM SLAVERY TO PRISONS IN THE GOLD COAST, c. 1807–1957
(The Journal of African History, 2020-03) Balakrishnan, S
AbstractContrary to the belief that prisons never predated colonial rule in Africa, this article traces their emergence in the Gold Coast after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. During the era of ‘legitimate commerce’, West African merchants required liquidity to conduct long-distance trade. Rather than demand human pawns as interest on loans, merchants imprisoned debtors’ female relatives because women's sexual violation in prison incentivized kin to repay loans. When British colonists entered the Gold Coast, they discovered how important the prisons were to local credit. They thus allowed the institutions to continue, but without documentation. The so-called ‘native prisons’ did not enter indirect rule — and the colonial archive — until the 1940s. Contrary to studies of how Western states used prisons to control black labour after emancipation, this article excavates a ‘debt genealogy’ of the prison. In the Gold Coast, prisons helped manage cash flow after abolition by holding human hostages.
Open Access
Prison of the Womb: Gender, Incarceration, and Capitalism on the Gold Coast of West Africa, c. 1500–1957
(Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2023) Balakrishnan, S
Abstract To date, studies of imprisonment and incarceration have focused on the growth of male-gendered penal institutions. This essay offers a provocative addition to the global study of the prison by tracing the emergence of a carceral system in West Africa in the nineteenth century that was organized around the female body. By examining archival testimonies of female prisoners held in what were called “native prisons” in colonial Gold Coast (southern Ghana), this essay shows how birthing, impregnation, and menstruation shaped West Africa penal practices, including the selection of the captives, the duration of their time in prison, and how the prison factored into the legal infrastructure around tort settlements for debts and crimes. The term “prison of the womb” is used here to describe how the West African prison held bloodlines captive, threatening the impregnation of a female kin member as a ticking clock for tort settlement. Furthermore, it will be shown that this institution was imperative to the spread of mercantile capitalism in nineteenth-century Gold Coast.
Open Access
The Afropolitan Idea: New Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in African Studies
(History Compass, 2017-02) Balakrishnan, S
Open Access
The jailhouse divergence: Why debtors’ prisons disappeared in 19th century Europe and flourished in West Africa
(Punishment and Society, 2022-01-01) Balakrishnan, S
It has been argued that the debtors’ prison was abolished in 19th century Europe and North America because the institution contradicted the principles of modern capitalism; by confining debtors for unpaid loans, it punished the poor while hampering the creditor, who could not be repaid by a debtor rotting in jail. This essay revises these assumptions through a study of debtors’ prisons in 19th century Ghana. It argues that, in both Europe and West Africa, the debtors’ prison historically emerged as a hostage-taking institution. Families paid their members’ loans to free them. In 19th century Ghana, this system proved crucial to the spread of mercantile capitalism; debt inmates were released within a week and creditors were repaid in full. However, in Euro-America, a new belief in homo economicus as the ‘self-made man’ portrayed insolvency as an individual failure. The European nuclear family also reduced the financial base supporting the debtor. The result was that debtors faced months, if not years, behind bars. This essay suggests that debtors’ prisons disappeared in Europe, while flourishing in West Africa, not due to the emergence of capitalism, but because of the social fabric of credit relations—the financial obligations of Africa kin networks versus European families.