Research project

This project responds to an urgent contemporary challenge: If we are inhabiting a rapidly warming planet, then we are also experiencing constant redefinitions of cooling. A historical approach that attempts to understand how humans have related to “heat” and “cold” over time reveals that, far from being a marginal field of technical expertise, the production and maintenance of cold has structured Europe’s relationships with the so-called Third World[1] in important and hitherto largely unrecognized ways. The influences of colonial science and race theory, with its conception of tropical environments as depleting and their inhabitants as intellectually inferior and lazy, outlived empire itself and informed plans for postcolonial modernization. Since the end of World War II, Europeans have confronted rapidly changing relationships with the hotter regions of the world, marked by decolonization, Cold War rivalries, and inequalities resulting from climate change that have posed significant challenges to the project of global governance. By exploring histories of the construction of cold, we can trace how expert knowledge and planning confronted, adapted to, and produced a series of highly differentiated cold spaces, thereby probing how thermal discourses and practices informed notions of development in extra-European contexts.

The task of implementing and adapting cooling technologies to the climatic, social, economic, and political conditions of Africa, however, complicated schematic plans for technology transfer and challenged experts. Embracing its role as a continental forerunner after becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to achieve independence in 1957, the government of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana embraced cooling as part of larger plans to encourage development through the promotion of science, technology, and industry at a breakneck speed. After the coup that toppled Nkrumah in 1966, Ghana entered years of political and economic turmoil, experiencing the privatization of development and a period of structural adjustment beginning in 1980: these tumultuous decades ushered in a series of new partners and plans for development, reflecting new priorities and realities. The construction of the coldscape––a concept we use to refer to the range of cooling technologies small and large with purposes ranging from commercial shipping, to domestic cooling, to biomedical research––took place alongside the renegotiation of the geopolitical relationship between Ghana and Europe, and Global South and Global North more broadly, during this period. Thus, examining the construction of cold as an integral part of development reshapes how we look at the impact of decolonization in Europe, Ghana’s self-assertion on the world stage, and the global Cold War.

[1] The terms “First,” “Second,” and “Third” worlds are used for convenience, though understood to be in quotation marks.