The Department of History (University of Ghana, Legon) and the International Research Center for Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History the University of Humboldt in Germany have the pleasure of inviting members of the University community to a keynote lecture entitled “Work, Workers, Working Class: The Ambiguities of ‘Free’ Labour in Colonial Africa” to be delivered by Professor Frederick Cooper.
Date & Time: Monday, January 20, 2014 at 5.00 pm
Venue: Coconut Grove Hotel, North Ridge Accra
The lecture will open the International Conference on "Pathways into Colonial (and Postcolonial?) Coercion: The creation and evolution of forced labour in Sub Saharan Africa under Colonial Rule,
1890-1975" to be held in Ho from 21st January 2014 to 25th January 2014.
Please find below a brief profile of keynote speaker:
Frederick Cooper is a Professor of History at New York University, having received his PhD from Yale University in 1974. He specializes in colonization, decolonization, and the contemporary East African history of labour relations, especially plantation slavery and other sorts of agricultural labour relations in coastal Kenya and Zanzibar. In his Africa since 1940: the Past of the Present (2002) he introduced to the literature the notion of “gatekeeper states.” He is an influential critic of standard colloquialisms such as ‘globalization,’ ‘empire,’ ‘identity’ and ‘development,’ presenting historical evolution of these key terms as an antidote to their chronic oversimplification in current academic parlance. His own recent books include Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge History (2005) and Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996).
