Review
"Contrary to the glib forecasts of many academic and journalistic pundits, race is not going away; rather it is energetically reorganizing itself and working through new global divisions. Globalization and Race examines this new context by inquiring into the various ways that emerging global processes are fundamentally reshaping the way people of African descent experience and theorize racial identity." David Scott, author of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment " Globalization and Race will be an invaluable resource for courses on diaspora, anthropology, and cultural studies. The keen attention to subjectivities created through discourses and practices that figure race, gender, class, national, and continental differences in global contexts makes this volume distinctive." Paulla A. Ebron, author of Performing Africa
Product Description
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 racialisation and trans-national circulations set in motion by imperialism and slavery; between the work of anthropologists, policymakers, religious revivalists, and activists and the solidification and globalization of racial categories; and between popular culture and global conceptions of blackness. 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. The 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.