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suggests that “future studies [perhaps] consider parallels between [ . . . ] the fear of the
dissemination of the Haitian slave revolt across the Americas and anxiety about Arab in-
cursion across U.S. and European borders, eugenic anxiety and the discourse of terrorist
‘cells’” (14). Her words evoke the cliché about how ignorance of past events leads to the
repetition of those mistakes. This collection of essays goes some way in reminding the
audience that history continues to offer lessons to be learned; it is a worthy contribution
to the ever-expanding fields concerning the Americas.
—Vanessa K. Valdés

Notes

1. Thomas Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (Durham: Duke UP,
1993) 191.
2. Skidmore 192.

*****

Clarke, Kamari Maxine, and Deborah Thomas, eds. Globalization and Race: Transformations
in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

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 dem-
onstrate “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 con-
tributors to the collection are anthropologists, the anthology also includes chapters by

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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 relation-
ships 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 com-
mon 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 cen-
tury” (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 the nation-
state to geographically separate black “racially ‘inferior’ types” from elite light-skinned
Dominicans to keep blacks from impeding the “advancement of the entire country” (63).
Adams illustrates that Afro-Dominicans resisted total integration by using Vodu’ as a
“hidden transcript” (57) to navigate through “modern economic transformations, perva-
sive unemployment, poverty, and social upheaval” giving rise to Liborismo, a “popular
modernism,” that combined the progressive needs of the nation-state, while remaining
scripted from the experiences of the past (64). Thus, it was through the changing semiotics
of “popular religion” and a desire to “create belonging and order in a changing world”
that “the peasants of the San Jaun Valley advocated for their own dynamic version of
modernity” (71–72). While Bakers and Adams investigate the desires of the elite deployed
through modernization projects, Brown’s ethnographic case study provides readers with
an introduction to ideas about cultural and social geographies (which are covered in sec-

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tion two of the collection) and focuses on the ways in which diasporic movements, indeed
desires, have been historically gendered and sexualized processes.
Beginning with a quick review of the birth of Liverpool as a seaport, Brown discusses
the ways in which blackness was and is actualized through the sexual politics of its in-
habitants. Black African seamen arrived in Liverpool and settled with English and Irish
white women, which Brown argues “set into motion both the institutions of interracial
marriage and its one-way gendering” (75). Black women became “sisters” and as such
were not desirable partners; Brown is, thus, titillated to learn that black women, as a means
of coping, developed a predilection for the “American Dream” or, rather, the glamour of
what they perceived Americans could offer them that black men in Liverpool could not or
would not (78). Recasting Arjun Appadurai’s “politics of desire” in order to move beyond
nostalgia for home and for Africa, Brown argues instead that “‘longing’ in the formation
of the diasporas” (87) resulted in men’s and women’s migration to Liverpool in search of
their dreams. In wresting the notion of desire from its “home” in theory, Brown allows for
a space in which women are present and agential in the Black Diaspora.
While section one of the collection is inflected by the social politics that inform and shape
movement in and through diasporic spaces, the six chapters in part two, “Geographies of
Racial Belonging,” advances the idea that the Black Diaspora is a socially mapped space
where belonging and difference are scripted through historically racialized processes.
This section traces the discursive shifts in ideas, histories, politics, and citizenship that are
informed by the transnational racial politics of “scholars, policy-makers, and activists”
(17). Using social movements as means of insight into transformative notions of identity,
Isar P. Godreau’s “Folkloric Others” addresses Latin American activists’ reactions to the
increasing veiling and popularization of blanqueamiento, which is a purging of blackness
from the mestizaje or mixed races in black Puerto Rican communities on the island (171).
Godereau examines a government-sponsored housing project that was built in 1996 as
a state “celebration of blackness” and argues that the state apparatus has co-opted the
idea of “diversity” as a means to cloak blanqueamiento, thereby further segregating and
distancing “cultural signs of blackness” (172, 174). In his 2002 fieldwork, Godereau found
that people were grateful for decent living spaces, but resentful of the assumption that
black residents of San Antón would automatically want to live in a “communal space”
(185). This essay is of particular significance not only in terms of teaching about the pos-
sibilities of work in anthropology outside of academia, but it also calls attention to the
black communities of Puerto Rico who are still marginalized by the nation-state due to
the color of their skin.
While Godereau’s chapter focuses on the deliberate shaping of the geography of black-
ness by those with the “power to implement their imaginations” (186), Grant Farred traces
the political discourse of a burgeoning and newly deracialized democracy. In “Shooting
the White Girl First,” Farred presents a compelling analysis of post-apartheid race politics
in South Africa using Paul Gilroy’s Against Race as its point of departure. Farred uses the
narrative of Toni Morrison’s Paradise as a metaphorical entrance into a discussion of the
new racial, or rather, the non-racialized politics of South Africa. While Gilroy asks us to
“unmoor race from the body,” culture, and history in order to “promote the questioning of
the ‘essentialized’ self,” Farred argues that scholars must understand that moving beyond

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race is virtually impossible: race and racism are “not only dialectical but epistemologically
foundational” (227–28).
In this chapter, Farred examines Mandela and Mbeki, South Africa’s first two black
presidents who have had the task of transitioning the “foundational element” of society—
race—into an “incorporative commonality of national identity” as a new “nonracially
imagined community” (231). The emergent nonracialized nationalism in democratic South
Africa parallels the “metaphoric challenge that to Morrison’s work poses for the post-
apartheid dispensation,” and Farred finds that such “paradise” has become just another
“oppressive discourse for black South Africans” whose “fault lines” are only beginning
to be mapped (231, 240, 245).
Part three, “Popular Blackness, ‘Authenticity,’ and New Measures of Legitimacy,”
concludes the anthology with five chapters that discuss sex, music, television, and dance.
In her essay “Havana’s Timba,” Ariana Hernandez-Reguant argues that the newly popu-
larized timba music of the mid-1990s provides Afro-Cubans with a new “presence and
visibility” that does not threaten the national “status quo,” but rather provides unique
strategies for male social mobility through “intimacy and sexuality” (250–51). Although
its focus is on the gendered productions of male conquests of women (an all-too-familiar
story), the chapter expands the discussion of racial and gender hierarchies to illustrate
that these sexual, gender, and racial politics are often imbricated in nationalist discourses,
which are also guided by “class privileges and state authority” (272).
In contrast to a focus on the politics of masculinity, Oneka Labennett in “Reading Buffy and
Looking Proper” revisits several themes from earlier in the collection, such as immigration,
transnationalism, and urbanization; however, her primary focus is on consumption as a means
to analyze popularized notions of identity politics for young first- and second-generation
West Indian women in Brooklyn, New York. Employing ethnography as her methodology
Labennett argues that Buffy “mines” Africa for notions of blackness in order to perpetuate
its “quasi science fiction” (285) narrative. While this piece is critical of cultural productions
that represent African Americans in a derogatory manner, like Buffy does, Labennett ascribes
agency to the choices West Indian American women make about representations of them-
selves, thus problematizing notions of “ethnic identity categories as static” (281). She argues
that these young people identified with Buffy as a teen who does not and cannot fit in with
the “norm,” but through this show teens also noticed that race is often silenced in popular
culture (289). Labennett found that teens were selective about the messages they receive
and incorporate into their lifestyles. Ultimately, this chapter works to debunk Theodore
Adorno’s notions about passive mass consumerism by emphasizing the agency involved
in the consumption practices and identity formation of teen West Indian girls.
The edited collection adds new and useful scholarship to the growing field of diaspora,
particularly in terms of gender. The collection is in large part a reaction to Paul Gilroy’s
work, which is characterized as a “reinvigoration of diaspora studies,” however, as Brown
argues in her piece, Gilroy’s somewhat utopian conception of “universal black participa-
tion” (75) in culture tends to elide power differentials that work within and outside of the
diaspora. Globalization and Race, though, pays particular attention to asymmetrical social
politics; furthermore, the contributors have extended the social and physical geography of
the diasporic landscape beyond the Atlantic triangle. This anthology serves as a successful
reaction to Gilroy’s work insofar as it does breach the “approved space for politics” that he

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calls for in The Black Atlantic (114). Furthermore, by couching diasporic processes in terms of
globalization, scholars may more readily tackle the paradox that race presents for scholars
of the Black Diaspora by examining how people are living with the consequences.
—Cierra Olivia Thomas-Williams

Works Cited

Clarke, Kamari Maxine, and Deborah Thomas, eds. Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural
Production of Blackness. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

*****

Prograis, Lawrence, Jr., and Edmund D. Pellegrino, eds. African American Bioethics: Culture,
Race, and Identity. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2007.

At first glance at the cover of Lawrence Prograis, Jr., MD, and Edmund D. Pellegrino,
MD’s African American Bioethics: Culture, Race and Identity, I was struck by the rather overt
picture of a black hand, palm faced forward. The words, in black—“African American
Bioethics”—were stamped into the palm of that hand, and at a closer look, even the savvy
observer would notice that the hand was a left hand, with opposable thumb to the left. The
sub-text, written in white and quite off-centered toward the bottom-right, cascaded from
the top-down the words in smaller print: “Culture, Race, and Identity.” This image of a
weathered black hand grabbing as it were the reader’s attention is commensurate with the
book’s overt topic at hand: the position of the African-American experience in relation to the
field of medical ethics, specifically its practice toward the African-American community.
Prograis and Pellegrino introduce and deliver an answer to their seminal inquest: Is
there a distinctive African American Bioethics? As combined editors and contributors them-
selves, both Prograis and Pellegrino tackle this question admirably in their work African
American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity. Moreover, they are not alone. Armed with
the distinct voices of medical practitioners, philosophers, researchers, and ethicists, this
volume analyses the collective subjects of the work’s subtext: Culture, Race, and Identity.
The work features ten sections, of which an “Introduction” by Pellegrino and an “Af-
terword” by Prograis frame eight rather meaty selections within 169 pages of text. These
chapters range from the philosophical offerings of Jorge L. A. Garcia’s “Revisiting African
American Perspectives on Biomedical Ethics: Distinctiveness and Other Questions,” to
the personal narrative of medical practitioner and forensic psychiatrist Ezra E. H. Grif-
fith’s “Personal Narrative and an African American Perspective on Medical Ethics,” as
well as the hard-hitting semantic examination of race by oncologist Kevin FitzGerald and
geneticist Charmaine Royal’s “Race, Genetics, and Ethics.” Threaded throughout the text
is a constant reminder of what’s at stake: health decisions based on race and the implica-

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