Kamari Maxine Clarke

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 racialization and transnational circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness; and between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories. 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. Contributors . Robert L. Adams, Lee D. Baker, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina M. Campt, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Raymond Codrington, Grant Farred, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, John L. Jackson Jr., Oneka LaBennett, Naomi Pabst, Lena Sawyer, Deborah A. Thomas

Toward a Critically Engaged Ethnographic Practice

This article interogates what it means for anthropologists as “social critics” to be engaged in documenting efforts that not only have explanatory power but connect that power to praxis. The key here is to recognize how delimiting innocence and guilt in the context of war is clearly a political act that is not without problems. It involves identifying our public spheres and determining what has happened to those publics within which we speak. I suggest we first rethink what it means for ethnography to serve a public domain within which we speak. This involves rethinking what it means for ethnography to serve a public domain as a mechanism of engagement with all types of subjects—victims, warlords, negotiators, intermediaries, child soldiers, and even so‐called terrorists. In this regard, I suggest that return to the intentions at the core of the anthropological code of ethics, codes that guide our commitment to our informant publics. By locating the limits of our code of ethics we can rectify the ways that the history of anthropological engagement in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries has been preoccupied with documenting “local” peoples as the “authentic” voices to be protected and understood while it has excluded other interlocutors. By rethinking the ethics of research we can use the tools of our discipline in principled forms of engagement with a range of publics.

The Legal Politics of the Article 16 Decision: The International Criminal Court, the un Security Council and Ontologies of a Contemporary Compromise

This introductory essay aims to offer a framework through which to make sense of the controversies arising from International Criminal Court (icc) intervention in Africa. One such controversy is related to the deployment of the powers to refer and defer icc cases central to Article 16 of the Rome Statute for the icc. The manner in which the unsc has employed this power has led critics – particularly on the African continent – to conclude that a range of geopolitics has undermined the judicial independence of the icc. The essay argues, therefore, that the drafting history of Article 16 of the Rome Statute shows the workings of the political origins of the law and the manner in which foundational inequalities were woven into the very fabric of the Rome Statute. Following theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Walter Benjamin who have conceptualized law as violence and who have taken seriously the ways in which violence and inequality live on through the law, the authors argue that not only can contemporary ontologies of international criminal law not escape the politics of its making, but if we are to adequately address the conditions of violence in the postcolonial African state there must be an ontological shift in the way we conceptualize law. They propose a rethinking that acknowledges root causes of violence and that take seriously politically adumbrated histories of violence that continue live in the armature of the postcolonial state. Considering how and when political settlements are relevant and rethinking how complementarity and cooperation might work more effectively are key to the conceptual framework.