Columbia University Seminars: Studies in Contemporary Africa
Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana's Cold War by Nana Osei-Opare
Date: February 25, 5:00 PM
Location: Faculty House
Please write to [email protected] to RSVP
Event Description: Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of colonialism across the African continent and the world's first Black socialist state. Utilising materials from Ghanaian, Russian, English, and American archives, Nana Osei-Opare offers a provocative and new reading of this defining moment in world history through the eyes of workers, writers, students, technical-experts, ministers, and diplomats. Osei-Opare shows how race and Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Author: Nana Osei-Opare is a historian of African, international, and Cold War histories. He is an assistant professor at Rice University. His first book, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War (Cambridge, Nov. 2025), tells a new history of Ghana’s Cold War, political-economic, and decolonization projects during the Kwame Nkrumah era by situating Ghana within larger Marxist, racial, and socialist debates and geographies. The book is available for free via Open Access. Osei-Opare coedited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Su Lin Lewis. It is available for free via Open Access. With Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Osei-Opare most recently coedited a Special Issue on “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies” in the Slavic Review, Vol. 84, Issue 3 (January 2026). Furthermore, Osei-Opare has published articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History, the Journal of West African History, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies. He has produced public-facing pieces in Slate Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy Magazine, and History: The Journal of the Historical Association.
Columbia University Seminar Studies in Contemporary Africa
Co-chairs: Rhiannon Stephens and Casey McNeill
Rapporteur: Mylkah Djacko