Nana Osei-Opare is a historian of African, Cold War, and international histories. Through the words of everyday people and the intellectual and political elite, Osei-Opare’s first book project, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War and Decolonization Projects (contracted with Cambridge’s Global and International History Series), tells a new history of Ghana’s Cold War, political-economic, and decolonization projects during the Kwame Nkrumah era (1957-66). It situates Ghana within local and global twentieth century Marxist, racial, and socialist debates and geographies, and unpacks how Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana’s transformational attempts to achieve black freedom.
Osei-Opare is pursuing two future research agendas. The first is a study of the socialist movement in Ghana’s fourth republic, from 1990s to the present day. The second is a history of the Convention People’s Party—from its rise as the vanguard of African and black liberation in the early to middle of the 20th century to its descent to near obscurity.
Alongside these solo-projects, Osei-Opare is working on three collaborative projects. He co-edited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (Bloomsbury Publishers, forthcoming via Open Access on October 3, 2024) with Su Lin Lewis. In addition, he is coediting the Cambridge History of African Political Thought with Jonathon L. Earle, Emma Hunter, Harry N. K. Odamtten, and Ayesha Omar. Finally, Osei-Opare is coediting a special issue on blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies for the Slavic Review with Sunnie Rucker-Chang.
Osei-Opare has published articles on labor and labor agitation in postcolonial Africa; black radicals’ relationship to Marxist-Leninism; the value of postcolonial African archives and historical methodology; Ghana-Soviet relations; black lives in the Cold War; and the insertion of white supremacy and racism as an analytical category into the Cold War theoretical paradigm in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History, the Journal of West African History, and Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies. He has produced public facing articles in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy Magazine, and History: The Journal of the Historical Association.
Osei-Opare has received teaching awards at UCLA and Fordham University. He is excited to oversee undergraduate theses, one-on-one tutorials, and independent research projects with students interested in African, international, or Cold War history broadly construed. Osei-Opare also very much welcomes inquiries from graduate students interested said histories. He is the founder of the department’s Global & International History Seminar Series.
Prior to joining Rice University, Osei-Opare taught at Fordham (2019-2023). He was previously also a National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the NYPL (2023-2024) and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellow for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies’ School of Historical Studies (2022-2023).
PUBLICATIONS
Book:
2024. Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization, eds. (Bloomsbury Publishers, October 3, 2024), eds. with Su Lin Lewis. Available for free on Open Access.
Books-in-Progress:
Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War and Decolonization Projects (contracted to Cambridge University Press).
Cambridge History of African Political Thought (Cambridge University Press), eds. with Jonathan L. Earle, Emma Hunter, Harry N.K. Odamtten, and Ayesha Omar.
Selected Peer-Review Article Publications:
2024. “Fish, Discontent, and Socialist Modernities and Dreams in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana,” in Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization, pp. 215-236.
2024. “Introduction: Development Dreams from the Socialist South,” w/ Su Lin Lewis in Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization, pp. 1-10.
2023. “Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65:2, pp. 399-421.
2021. “‘If You Trouble a Hungry Snake, You Will Force It to Bite You’: Rethinking Postcolonial African Archival Pessimism, Worker Discontent, and Petition Writing in Ghana, 1957-66,” The Journal of African History 62:1, pp. 59-78.
2019. “Uneasy Comrades: Postcolonial Statecraft, Race, and Citizenship, Ghana-Soviet Relations, 1957-1966,” Journal of West African History, 5:2, pp. 85-112.
Book Reviews, Book Forums, and Review Essays:
2024. Stephan F. Miescher, A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana (Indiana, 2022), in African Studies Review Book Forum
2023. Review Essay, “Russia/USSR in the World,” in The Russian Review. Choi Chatterjee, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach (Bloomsbury, 2022); Alessandro Iandolo, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell, 2022); and Natalia Telepneva, Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-1975 (UNC Press, 2022).
2021. Marcello Musto, Another Marx: Early Manuscripts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), History: Review of New Books, 49:5.
2019. “The Quest for Scientific Equity in Postcolonial Ghana,” Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence (Cambridge, 2019), Journal of African History, 62:1
2017. Steven Friedman, Race, Class, and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid, African Studies Quarterly, 16:3-4.
2014. Barry Gilder, Songs & Secrets: South Africa from Liberation to Governance, Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, 38:1.
2014. Carmela Garritano, African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History, African Studies Quarterly, 14:3.
Selected Public-Facing Publications:
2022. “Anti-Black racism is upending easy narratives about the exodus from Ukraine,” The Washington Post, March 3, 2022, with Thom Loyd.
2020. “When It Comes to America’s Race Issues, Russia Is a Bogeyman,” Foreign Policy Magazine, July 6, 2020.
2020. “Around the world, America has long been a symbol of antiblack racism,” The Washington Post, June 5, 2020.
2019. “Books that I Teach,” Black Agenda Report Book Forum, December 11, 2019.