Returns of Return: Racial Capitalism and ‘Detty December’ in Accra, Ghana

• In Event: Race, Gender, and Class Geographies

Abstract

Accelerated by the 2019 Year of Return, thousands of African diasporans from across the globe flock to Accra, Ghana, to celebrate Detty December – weeks of nightlife events, concerts, and festivals during the festive season. This paper answers the research questions: How does racial capitalism motivate individuals to leave ‘the West’? How do members of the African diaspora reproduce racial capitalism in Accra through return travel? I conceptualise the notion of “returns of return”, which, beyond (1) geographic movement, highlights (2) intergenerational hauntings and repetition of returns by Ghanaian migrants and (3) a kind of compensatory return on investment. ‘Returns of return’ stabilise racial capitalism by offering racialised, gendered and classed lifestyle elevation via travel and proximity to malleable whiteness that remedies diasporans’ negative experiences of racial capitalism in the global north. Understanding the global configuration of racial capitalism in its local iteration of Detty December and untangling the role of enjoyment within racial capitalism helps us understand the “seductive” (Bhattacharyya, 2018:4) dimension of racial capitalism. This conceptualisation of whiteness as a carried proprietary disposition within a nexus of race, class and gender, and as compensation, expands analyses of wages of whiteness. It helps us understand how compensatory whiteness draws in those that it harms as complicit agents upholding and consenting to racial capitalism.

Author

• Miriam Emefa Dzah, University of Cambridge