Writing International Histories from Ordinary Places: Postcolonial Classrooms,Teachers,and Foreign Policy in Ghana,1957–83

Abstract

This article examines the effects of foreign teachers on Ghanaian education during the 1960s and 1970s. It calls attention to the ways that foreign policy articulates with the lives of ordinary people in former colonies, an approach I call ‘writing international histories from ordinary places.’ At the intersection of globalized archival collections and local sources and scholarship, ‘ordinary places’ offer us new vantage points from which to approach the extraverted histories of the postcolonial world.