Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (review)

This edited collection analyzes “the changing meanings and politics of blackness” (4) that move beyond the rootedness of origins in the Black Diaspora; Globalization and Race: Transformation in the Cultural Production of Blackness considers identity processes as multi-leveled, complex, and politically laden. The editors, Deborah A. Thomas and Kamari M. Clarke, situate diaspora, “a process that generates subjects through negotiations arising from particular structural and historical conditions that change over time” (12), firmly within the context of “relational networks” (13) developed through globalization—a multifaceted process of transnational movements with meanings that change over time. The contributors agree that what are missing from current discussions of globalization are the very social constitutions of myriad politicized economies, thus moving analyses beyond “deterritorialized” economies and the loss of “original” relationships between people and things. Thomas and Clarke argue that the globalization of race politics forces scholars to consider the new “geometry” of the color line, which can no longer be theorized in terms of black and white (33). Globalization and Race, then, presents “the particularities of contemporary racialized circulations” with research questions that address and demonstrate “who travels, what travels, and how transnational alliances are tied to particular knowledge economies” (9). As such, this collection takes all forms of cultural production seriously, even, and especially, popular culture.

The interdisciplinary, multi-institutional collaborative project was conceived of at the 2001 American Anthropological Association (vii) and although the majority of the contributors to the collection are anthropologists, the anthology also includes chapters by interdisciplinary scholars who work in women’s studies, African and African-American studies, literature, sociology, and cultural studies. The book consists of seventeen chapters that are separated into three overarching themes that speak to the differing ways in which the essays explore the formation of the Black Diaspora in the context of globalization. For the purposes of this review a chapter or two from each section is singled out for further discussion due to the unique overall contribution to scholarship in the anthropology of the Black Diaspora.

Part one, “Diasporic Movements, Missions, and Modernities,” historicizes discussions of globalization and race and addresses the multiple meanings of modernity, education, and religion, and their influence on the changing meanings of diaspora. These four chapters expand traditional definitions of the geography of the diaspora to include the relationships between Native Americans, Hawaiians, and African Americans (Lee D. Baker), the black people of the “Dominican Borderlands” (Robert L. Adams, Jr.), Afro-Germans (Tina M. Campt), and Black Canadians (Naomi Pabst). This section also includes a chapter that discusses the ways in which gender and sexual desire also help to shape the geography of the diaspora (Jacqueline Nassy Brown). The myriad implications of desire are a common thread throughout the chapters in section one as the writers investigate and push the boundaries of what is known as the Black Diaspora.

Baker’s article “Missionary Positions” explores racial uplift as a process “that linked Hawaiians, American Indians, and African Americans during the late nineteenth century” (37). Connected by a common civilizing mission, Baker writes, diverse populations underwent similar cultural transformations in America leading to the “formulation of a universal model of industrial education,” which gave rise to a new class of “Negro elites” (37, 51). Complicating earlier theories that position Christian missionaries at the pinnacle of racial hierarchy, Baker argues that educated people of color utilized the ideals of racial uplift to position themselves against and above the barbarism of “savage African culture,” which “coded race in cultural or performative terms” where civilized behavior constituted access to citizenship (52). Similarly, Adams in “History at the Crossroads: Vodu’ and the Modernization of the Dominican Borderlands” demonstrates the desire of the “Dominican modernization campaign” to eradicate Vodu’, which represented a primitive “national habit” that positioned blacks as “shameless and lazy” in contrast to the emergent elite Dominican citizenry: light-skinned, male property owners (62–63).

Adams writes that borders, from fences to vagrancy laws, allowed elites of...