The Dilemma of Diasporic Africans: Adger Emerson Player and Anti-Americanism in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana

Abstract

AbstractPostcolonial Ghana faced many challenges, which led to a hunt for saboteurs of Black liberation epitomized in anti-Americanism. In 1964, Adger Emerson Player, an African American, rescued the United States flag from a Ghanaian anti-American demonstration. The differing interpretations of Player’s deed by Ghanaians and Americans reveal the contestation between racial and national identities, which is also a facet of the broader diasporic African identity dilemmas. Amoh examines this incident within the context of post-independence Ghana and the U.S. Civil Rights struggle to highlight the complexity of diasporic Africans’ relations with Africa and ongoing debates on the substance of pan-Africanism and global Blackness.