Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness

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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. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Globalization and the Transformations of Race • Deborah A. Thomas and Kamari Maxine Clarke PART I: DIASPORIC MOVEMENTS, MISSIONS, AND MODERNITIES Missionary Positions • Lee D. Baker History at the Crossroads: Vodú and the Modernization of the Dominican Borderlands • Robert L. Adams Jr. Diaspora and Desire: Gendering ‘‘Black America’’ in Black Liverpool • Jacqueline Nassy Brown Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space: Writing History Between the Lines • Tina M. Campt ‘‘Mama, I’m Walking to Canada’’: Black Geopolitics and Invisible Empires • Naomi Pabst PART II: GEOGRAPHIES OF RACIAL BELONGING Mapping Transnationality: Roots Tourism and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Heritage • Kamari Maxine Clarke Emigration and the Spatial Production of Difference from Cape Verde • Kesha Fikes Folkloric ‘‘Others’’: Blanqueamiento and the Celebration of Blackness as an Exception in Puerto Rico • Isar P. Godreau Gentrification, Globalization, and Georaciality • John L. Jackson Jr. Recasting ‘‘Black Venus’’ in the ‘‘New’’ African Diaspora • Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe ‘‘Shooting the White Girl First’’: Race in Post-apartheid South Africa • Grant Farred PART III: POPULAR BLACKNESSES, ‘‘AUTHENTICITY,’’ AND NEW MEASURES OF LEGITIMACY Havana’s Timba: A Macho Sound for Black Sex • Ariana Hernandez-Reguant Reading Buffy and ‘‘Looking Proper’’: Race, Gender, and Consumption among West Indian Girls in Brooklyn • Oneka Labennett The Homegrown: Rap, Race, and Class in London • Raymond Codrington Racialization, Gender, and the Negotiation of Power in Stockholm’s African Dance Courses • Lena Sawyer Modern Blackness: Progress, ‘‘America,’’ and the Politics of Popular Culture in Jamaica • Deborah A. Thomas Bibliography Contributors Index