The African Diaspora and the Disciplines

Contributors

Contributors Latifa F. J. Borgelin is a doctoral student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the relationship between genetics and infectious disease in humans, with particular interest in determining how adaptation to infectious diseases has helped shape the genetic architecture of African-­ descended peoples of the New World. Her work has been presented at the National Conference on HIV/ AIDS, African HIV/AIDS Conference, and Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Kim D. Butler is Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is a historian specializing in African diaspora studies with a focus on Brazil and Latin America/Caribbean. Her major work is Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-­ Brazilians in Post-­ Abolition San Paulo and Salvador. This publication won her the American Historical Association’s Wesley-­Logan Prize and the Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods Brown Prize. Melvin L. Butler is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. His research interests center on the dynamics of musical experience , national identity, and charismatic Christian practice in Haiti, Jamaica, and the United States. His work has appeared in Ethnomusicology , Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Black Music Research Journal, Obsidian, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Current Musicology. Judith A. Carney is Professor of Geography at the University of California in Los Angeles. She is a specialist in environment and development in West Africa and the African diaspora. She is author of Black Rice: The Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, which won the Melville Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association in 2002 and the James M. Blaut Award from the Association of American Geographers in 2003. She is co-­ author (with Richard Nicholas Rosomoff) of In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (2009). Carolyn Cooper is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. One of Jamaica’s foremost cultural critics, she has hosted her own television talk show and is a frequent 339 340 Contributors contributor to public debates on gender and culture in Jamaica. She is author of Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large. Grant Farred is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He is author of several books, most recently What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals; Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA; and Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football. He is the general editor of the journal South Atlantic Quarterly. Robert Fatton Jr. is the Julia A. Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia . He is author of Black Consciousness in South Africa; The Making of a Liberal Democracy: Senegal’s Passive Revolution, 1975–1985; Predatory Rule: State and Civil Society in Africa; Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy; and The Roots of Haitian Despotism . Paget Henry is Professor of Sociology at Brown University. He has taught at SUNY Stony Brook, the University of the West Indies (Antigua), and the University of Virginia. He is author of Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-­ Caribbean Philosophy and Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and co-­ editor of C. L. R. James’s Caribbean and New Caribbean: Decolonization, Democracy, and Development. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe is a Visiting Research Fellow in Africana ­Women’s Studies at Bennett College, having previously held the position of Reader in Anthropology at the University of East London. She is an anthropologist whose research interests include feminist, (post)colonial, and transnational genealogies of the African diaspora. Among her publications are Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of “Race,” Nation, and Gender and “Mixed Race” Studies: A Reader. She is working on a new book project provisionally entitled Out of Africa (“By Any Means Necessary”): Recent Clandestine West African Migrations and the Gendered Politics of Survival. Fatimah L. C. Jackson is Professor of Biological Anthropology and Distinguished Scholar-­Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also Director of the Institute for African American Research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is an expert on the biohistory of African peoples and their descendants in the diaspora and has coordinated genetics research on the African Burial Ground Project in New York City. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Human Biology , American...