Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness

Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas argue that a firm grasp of globalization requires an understanding of how race has constituted and been constituted by global transformations. Focusing attention on race as an analytic category, this state of the art collection of essays explores the changing meanings of blackness in the context of globalization. It illuminates the connections between contemporary global processes of racialisation and trans-national circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories; and between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness. A number of the essays bring to light the formative but not unproblematic influence of African American identity on other populations within the black diaspora. Among these are an examination of the impact of "black America" on racial identity and politics in mid-twentieth-century Liverpool and an inquiry into the distinctive experiences of blacks in Canada.Contributors investigate concepts of race and space in early-twenty-first century Harlem, the experiences of trafficked Nigerian sex workers in Italy, and the persistence of race in the purportedly non-racial language of the "New South Africa. " They highlight how blackness is consumed and expressed in Cuban timba music, in West Indian adolescent girls' fascination with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in the incorporation of American rap music into black London culture. Connecting race to ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion, these essays reveal how new class economies, ideologies of belonging, and constructions of social difference are emerging from ongoing global transformations.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Globalization and the Transformations of Race / Deborah A. Thomas and Kamari Maxine Clarke 1
Part I. Diasporic Movements, Missions and Modernities
Missionary Positions / Lee D. Baker 37
History at the Crossroads: Vodu and the Modernization of the Dominican Borderlands / Robert L. Adams 55
Diaspora and Desire: Gendering “Black America” in Black Liverpool / Jacqueline Nassy Brown 73
Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space: Writing History Between the Lines / Tina M. Campt 93
“Mama, I’m Walking to Canada”: Black Geopolitics and Invisible Empires / Naomi Pabst 112
Part II. Geograpies of Racial Belonging
Mapping Transnationality: Roots Tourism and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Heritage / Kamari Maxine Clarke 133
Emigration and the Spatial Production of Difference from Cape Verde / Kesha Fikes 154
Folkloric “Others”: Blanqueamiento and the Celebration of Blackness as an Exception in Puerto Rico / Isar P. Godreau 171
Gentrification, Globalization, and Georaciality / John L. Jackson Jr. 188
Recasting “Black Venus” in the “New” African Dispora / Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe 206
“Shooting the White Girl First”: Race in Post-aparteid South Africa / Grant Farred 226
Part III. Popular Blacknesses, “Authenticity,” and New Measures of Legitimacy
Havana’s Timba: A Macho Sound for Black Sex / Ariana Hernandez-Reguant 249
Reading Buffy and “Looking Proper”: Race, Gender, and Consumption among West Indian Girls in Brooklyn / Oneka Labennett 279
The Homegrown: Rap, Race, and Class in London / Raymond Codrington 299
Racialization, Gender, and the Negotiation of Power in Stockholm’s African Dance Courses / Lena Sawyer 316
Modern Blackness: Progress, “America,” and the Politics of Popular Culture in Jamaica / Deborah A. Thomas 335
Bibliography 355
Contributors 391
Index 395

About the Author :

Kamari Maxine Clarke is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. She is the author of Mapping YorÙbÁ Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities, also published by Duke University Press.

Deborah A. Thomas is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica, also published by Duke University Press.