Negotiating Race: Blackness and Whiteness in the context of homecoming to Ghana

This article aims to analyze the dynamics of the making and unmaking of racial identities by looking at the ways in which the issue of race is debated in the context of historical and more recent return movements of Africa Americans to Ghana. The discourse surrounding the return, or homecoming as it is commonly phrases, is determined by notions of an African family and Black kinship. In official rhetoric, race is represented as an irrefutable reality, and a shared racial identity appears as the key to the mutual understanding and common cause of Africans and African Americans. Going beyond this rhetoric, the author shows how the categories of blackness and whiteness, while being constructed as mutually exclusive, are rather flexible and constantly re-negotiated in the course of the homecoming practice. She argues that the entangled movements of diasporic return speak in profound ways of the complexity and ambivalence that are as the heart of processes of racialisation.