Bayo HolseyAssociate Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology
Bayo Holsey is an award-winning interdisciplinary scholar who works across the disciplines of Anthropology, History, and Cultural Studies. Her research spans three broad areas: slavery, collective memory, and the production of knowledge; race and diasporic consciousness; and African sovereignty and the global order.
Slavery, Collective Memory, and the Production of Knowledge. Professor Holsey’s first book, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana, examines collective memories of the Atlantic slave trade. Tracking historical narratives that circulate at various levels in Ghanaian society, she interrogates both silencing as well as the elaboration of historical narratives as memory practices that work to sustain various forms of community. The book is particularly concerned with the development of Ghana’s diaspora tourism industry and its role in the elaboration of a global Black identity in Ghana. This book won the Amaury Talbot Prize and the Toyin Falola Africa book award. In related publications, Professor Holsey has also examined the formation of institutionalized historical discourses through analyses of textbooks, government-sponsored public history projects, and popular media accounts. This body of scholarship untangles the deeply embedded colonial logics within constructions of West African history as well as the liberatory potential of historical narratives.
Race and Diasporic Consciousness. Many of Professor Holsey’s articles and book chapters have addressed the ways in which people of African descent in the Americas embrace a diasporic consciousness or, in other words, an understanding of themselves that gives primacy to their ancestral descent from the African continent. This work reveals that diasporic consciousness is a powerful tool used to combat the anti-Blackness of the global order. At the same time, Professor Holsey’s scholarship complicates the relationship between Africa and its diaspora by considering the uneven relationships that are often at play in transatlantic Black community formations.
African Sovereignty and the Global Order. Professor Holsey’s forthcoming book, entitled, Tyrannies of Freedom: African Exceptionalism and the Neocolonial Assemblage in the Millennial Age, turns to questions concerning African sovereignty in the 21st century, focusing again on the nation of Ghana as a primary site of inquiry. Through an analysis of international development discourses, the anti-trafficking regimes representational economy, and the expansion of Ghana’s diaspora tourism industry, this book examines the formation of a neocolonial assemblage linking the United States and Ghana. Though focused on the present, this project considers a long history of U.S. engagements with the African continent. Through this analysis, Professor Holsey interrogates the cultural logics of globalization attending, in particular, to the racialized foundations and practices of global capitalism.
Professor Holsey has previously served as the director of Emory’s Institute of African Studies and as an associate editor for History in Africa: A Journal of Method. She was the co-PI for the Mellon-Sawyer grant, “Visions of Slavery: Histories, Memories, and Mobilizations of Unfreedom in the Black Atlantic.”
Professor Holsey earned her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University. She previously taught at Duke University and Rutgers University.
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Publications
Books
- Tyrannies of Freedom: African Exceptionalism and the Neocolonial Assemblage in the Millennial Age. University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in Spring 2027.
- Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana. University of Chicago Press, 2008. (Awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2008 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology and the Association of Third World Studies’ 2008-09 Toyin Falola Africa Book Award.)
Editors’ Introductions
- “New Histories from the Margins of the Archive” Co-authored with Lorelle Semley, Teresa Barnes, and Edogi Uchendu. History in Africa: A Journal of Method (2025) 52: 1-5.
- “Editors’ Introduction,” Co-authored with Lorelle Semley, Teresa Barnes, and Edogi Uchendu. History in Africa: A Journal of Method (2024) 51: 1-4.
- “Future Directions in History in Africa.” Co-authored with Lorelle Semley, Teresa Barnes, and Edogi Uchendu. History in Africa: A Journal of Method (2023) 50: 1-6.
- “African History’s Interdisciplinary Roots, Ruts, and Routes.” Co-authored with Lorelle Semley, Teresa Barnes, and Edogi Uchendu. History in Africa: A Journal of Method (2022) 49: 1-8.
- “The Future of the African Past.” Co-authored with Lorelle Semley, Teresa Barnes, and Edogi Uchendu. History in Africa: A Journal of Method (2021) 48: 1-8.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
- “Diaspora Tourism.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
- “West Africa and the African Diaspora.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
- “Black Atlantic Visions: History, Race, and Transnationalism in Ghana.” Cultural Anthropology (2013) 28: 504-518.
- “Transnationalism.” Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, edited by John Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- “‘Watch the Waves of the Sea’: Literacy, Oral History, and the European Encounter in Elmina.” History in Africa: A Journal of Method (2011) 38: 79-101.
- “Rituel et Mémoire au Ghana: Les Usage Politiques de la Diaspora.” Critique Internationale 47 (April-June, 2010): 19-36.
Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters
- “Charged Memories: African Slave Traders in Contemporary Ghanaian Political Discourse.” In Slavery and Its Legacy in Ghana and the Diaspora, edited by Rebecca Shumway and Trevor Getz, 219-237. New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.
- “Slavery Tourism: Representing a Difficult History in Ghana.” In Oxford Handbook of Public History, edited by Jim Gardner and Paula Hamilton, 479-491. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
- “Embodying Africa: Roots-Seekers and the Politics of Blackness.” In The Trouble with Post-Blackness, edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Kathryn Merinda Simmons, 144-161. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
- “Writing about the Slave Trade: Early Twentieth Century Colonial Textbooks and their Authors.” In African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, Vol. I, edited by Martin Klein, Sandra Greene, Alice Bellagamba, and Carolyn Brown, 204-209. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- “In Place of Slavery: Fashioning Coastal Identity.” (Reprint from Routes of Remembrance). In Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation. Second Edition, edited by Roy Richard Grinker, Christopher B. Steiner, and Stephen C. Lubkemann, 372-378. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
- “Transatlantic Dreaming: Slavery, Tourism, and Diasporic Encounters.” In Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return, edited by Fran Markowitz and Anders Stefansson, 166-182. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004.
Other Publications
- “Owning Up to the Past?: African Slave Traders and the Hazards of Discourse.” Transition (2011) 105: 74-87.
Courses
Undergraduate Courses
- Freshman Seminar: Global Africa
- Globalization and Transnational Culture
- The Black Atlantic: History, Memory, Justice
Graduate Courses
- Theorizing Blackness
- The Black Atlantic: Theory, History, and Ethnography
- Colonialism/Neo-Colonialism
- Anthropology Pro-Seminar
