Colonial Reason, Sensibility, and the Ethnographic Style

Chapter 1, Colonial Reason, Sensibility, and the Ethnographic Style analyzes the colonial history of efforts to regulate and criminalize cutting in northern Ghana in order to examine the durable traces they left on the present and to expand and retool postcolonial feminist analysis. I want to account for the forms of power-knowledge, affect, and ordering of the world and desires to change it that stretch from colonialism to the present. I show that imperial interventions entailed anti-colonial opposition from within by regional officers posted in what is today northern Ghana whose politics were shaped by a white man’s burden to protect the natives from other white men and women. By examining the larger British governance of northern Ghana, we are able to see how violence and dispossession were enmeshed with the feminist will to knowledge, anthropological taxonomies, and benevolent appreciation of cultural difference and its codification for purposes of securing colonial rule.