Book Talk: An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, May 2026)

Refreshments will be offered in the Staff Lounge after the seminar.

In what measure could education be an agent of African freedom? An Anticolonial Development examines this question in two West African contexts, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, from roughly the 1890s to the 1980s. It argues that a Black Atlantic perspective fundamentally changes how we see decolonization and development in West Africa, by revealing schooling’s essential role in aspirations of African emancipation. Rejecting colonial exploitation of the African body, proponents of anticolonial development instead claimed the mind as the site of economic productivity for African people. Combining histories of race, education, decolonization, and neoliberalism, An Anticolonial Development shows how West Africans proposed an original understanding of development that fused antiracism to economic theory, and human dignity to material productivity.

A historian trained in African and global history, Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 2020. Her first book will be published as part of the African Studies series of Cambridge University Press in May 2026.