Faye V Harrison

The Du Boisian Legacy in Anthropology

race precluded his recognition by the Euro-American intelligentsia as the major pioneer that he indeed was. Post-Civil Rights Movement American academia, largely owing to the mobilizations and vigilance of Black students and scholars, has, however, bestowed some degree of recognition and honor upon his memory and legacy. Over the past two decades a considerable literature has grown attesting to the profound political and intellectual significance of Du Bois’ contributions. Robinson (1983) and Bond (1988) are among those who emphasize his role as an historian. His

Introduction: An African Diaspora Perspective For Urban Anthropology

This special issue is the outgrowth of a 1985 American Anthropological Association symposium that the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) and the Society for Urban Anthropology (SUA) cosponsored.1 That sessions and now this special issues title plays on that of a recent book, BLACK FOLK HERE AND THERE: AN ESSAY IN HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, VOLUME I (1987)2 written by St. Clair Drake, to whom this two-phased project is dedicated. The title of Drakes publication in turn signals his debt to W.E.B. DuBois, the author of BLACK FOLK, THEN AND NOW: AN ESSAY IN THE HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY OF THE NEGRO RACE (1939). The works of these two scholars, among many others, belong to an intellectual tradition too little known, understood, or appreciated beyond the boundaries of Black and Pan-African Studies, a framework for producing both knowledge and praxis. The purpose of this project has been threefold. First, we aim to bring the contributions of pioneers like Drake to the current discourse in mainstream anthropology, particularly to urban anthropology. Second, our objective is to demonstrate how the directions many urban anthropologists now follow have precedents not only in the commonly cited literature but also in neglected works certain Afro-American scholars produced in the periphery of American academic and intellectual life. Our third aim is to take a recurrent and key theme in Drakes works, viz., variant forms of domination and popular response in Africa and the African diaspora, and to address this broad problem from a variety of perspectives. With sociologist Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, while still a University of Chicago graduate student, wrote BLACK METROPOLIS: A STUDY OF NEGRO LIFE IN A NORTHERN CITY (1945). This book was an outcome of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) team-research effort that Lloyd Warner and Horace Cayton administered during the late 1930s. Before

Global Apartheid, Foreign Policy, and Human Rights

HUMAN RIGHTS—; “THE REASONABLE DEMANDS FOR PERSONAL SECURITY AND BASIC well-being that all individuals can make on the rest of humanity by virtue of their being members of the species Homo sapiens”1—are in increased jeopardy in this era of globalization. Small, poor countries increasingly are dominated by imposed economic controls that make a mockery of their rights to self-determination. For about two decades, this neoliberal regime—in which developed nations aid poorer nations on the condition that they restructure their economies and political systems to accommodate maximum wealth accumulation by multinational corporations—has arrived packaged as so-called free trade. This phenomenon is more than an idea or ideology. It is a cultural system, “a paradigm for understanding and organizing the world and for informing our practices within it.”2 It is “an approach to the world which includes in its purview not only economics but also politics, not only the public but also the private, not only what kinds of institutions we should have but also what kinds of subjects we should be.”3

Introduction to W.E.B. Du Bois and Anthropology

Those of us on the left in anthropology anticipate with serious misgivings and vigilance the triumphalism and xenophobia that will attend on the quincentennial anniversary of Columbus’ ’discovery’ of the Americas, even as the economies, societies and cultures driven by the forces of economic expansion since the late fifteenth century fall deeper into crisis and, in some cases, collapse. This foreseeable outcome is perhaps a proper coda for the oppressive processes that the Columbian ’celebration’ memorializes. In the waning years of the century, it is an appropriate time to reflect on what W.E.B. Du Bois called ’the problem of the twentieth century’ racism, with its discourses, ideologies, and practices for it is this ’problem’ which, along with capital accumulation, has been the demiurge of the systems of exploitation and oppression in the ’New World’ that have emerged and developed from the ’Age of Discovery’ to the present. It is precisely such a recognition that has led anthropologists to

Theorizing in ex-centric sites

This essay explores ways that theory is being engaged in recent trends in sociocultural anthropology. It addresses how some anthropologists are rethinking and working with theory in their social and cultural analyses. The current theoretical moment is conditioned by an expansion of the space and a multiplication of the sites where various forms of theorizing take place and are being acknowledged as such. The interrelated questions of what theory is and who produces it are being raised in the writings of a number of intellectuals around the world. Their theoretical and meta-theoretical claims have both disciplinary and transdisciplinary significance, warranting their being more seriously engaged, especially within the context of critical projects seeking to decolonize the making of anthropological knowledge.

Feminism in Anthropological Perspective.

Joan Cassell. A Group Called Women: Sisterhood and Symbolism in the Feminist Movement. Waveland Press, 1989 [1977], xxvi+ 240pp., appendix, references, and index.