Examines the enduring myth of Ghanaian exceptionalism and neoliberal freedom.

What is the legacy of the African Revolution today? Black Studies scholar and anthropologist Bayo Holsey addresses this question by examining the twenty-first-century relationship between the United States and Ghana, a nation that was once associated with a powerful vision of Black freedom. In Tyrannies of Freedom, she demonstrates that the period that saw the expansion of the US counterterror state also witnessed attempts to discredit this vision of freedom and replace it with another—one that centers the agency of US politicians, media pundits, and development experts.

Analyzing international development discourses, the anti-trafficking regime’s representational economy, and the expansion of Ghana’s branding as a homeland of the African diaspora, Holsey interrogates the operation of a millennial neocolonial assemblage that asserts, in various ways, that the United States is the guarantor of Ghanaian freedom while simultaneously implementing policies of surveillance, endangerment, and exploitation. At the same time, Holsey shows how Ghanaians and other Black subjects have contested these projects. Tracking the transformation of the Ghanaian nation from a beacon of Black freedom and Pan-African possibility to a battleground over the meanings of African sovereignty in a post-9/11 world, this important book addresses pressing questions concerning the operation of US power in Africa and the production and legitimation of a racialized global hierarchy.

Bayo Holsey is associate professor of African American studies and anthropology at Emory University. She is the author of Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Introduction
1. The Ghana Paradigm: Black Liberation and the Neoliberal Counterrevolution in Africa
2. The Duplicities of Securitization: Fashioning Racial Benevolence in the “Age of Terror”
First Grounding: “The Welfare of the People Was Supreme”: From Imperial Development Myths to Welfare State Dreams
3. Death of the African Social?: Economic Freedom, Racial Capitalism, and the Millennial Development Regime
Second Grounding: White Abolitionism and American Freedom
4. The Oprah Affect: White Abolitionism, Neoliberal Compassion, and the Humanitarian Frontier
Third Grounding: Black Heritage/Black Freedom
5. Exceptional Blackness: Black Neoliberal Freedom and the Homeland Brand
Coda. Ghana in the Thicket: The Question of African Freedom After the Millennial Age

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index