2012 Theses Doctoral

Tuskegee, Achimota and the Construction of Black Transcultural Identity

Newkirk, Pamela

Over the past four decades numerous scholars from a diverse range of fields, including history and comparative education, have turned to the transfer of the Hampton-Tuskegee model from the United States South to British colonial Africa to explore issues of global educational transfer and borrowing; nation-building; character education; and British colonial education policies. The primary goal of my dissertation is to consider this instance of educational transfer as a means of exploring the broader issues of black transcultural identity and black agency in education policy formation and implementation in the U.S. and in the Gold Coast. The two black actors who figure prominently in this case study are Booker T. Washington, the president and founder of Tuskegee Institute, and his African counter-part, James E.K. Aggrey, a co-founder of Achimota who together became the public face of the model on two continents while they quietly nurtured a elite cadre of black professionals and activists beneath the façade of industrial education. Using education as a site of social, political and economic transformation, this dissertation will require attention to both the explicit and subtle activities of Washington and Aggrey beneath the façade of accommodation to the prevailing ideology of white elites. This dissertation builds on emerging interdisciplinary scholarship on the African Diaspora that requires a new interpretative lens to assess the agency of subjugated blacks who used myriad techniques to negotiate a dominant white ideology committed to black subordination to advance a broader black nationalist agenda.