dr. Kamari Maxine Clarke
Biography of dr. Kamari Maxine Clarke
Mirrors of Justice: Culture, Power and the Making of History
Kamari Maxine Clarke (Ph.D., UC — Santa Cruz 1997) is an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University and research scientist at the Yale Law School. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of African American Studies. Trained in Political Science — International Relations at Concordia University, in Anthropology at both the New School for Social Research and the University of California — Santa Cruz, and Law at the Yale Law School, her areas of research explore issues related to religious nationalism, legal institutions, international law, the interface between culture and power and its relationship to the modernity of race and late capitalist globalization.
Professor Clarke's research interests have taken her to intentional Yoruba communities in the American South, traditionalist religious and legal domains in south-western Nigeria, international criminal tribunals, and international law training sessions in Ireland, London, Geneva, and Banjul and United Nations board rooms in New York City and The Hague.
Recent articles and books have focused on religious and legal movements and the related production of knowledge and power, including the 2004 publication of Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities published by Duke University Press, the 2006 co-edited publication of Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (Duke Press), and her forthcoming book, Justice in the Making: The International Criminal Court and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights, being considered by Cambridge University Press. Her forthcoming edited volumes include one with Rebecca Hardin entitled, Testimonies and Transformations: Reflections on the Uses of Ethnographic Knowledge, and the other with Mark Goodale entitled, Justice in the Mirror: Law, Culture, and the Making of History.
Over the past years, Professor Clarke has lectured in regions of the United States, Canada, South Africa, England, and the Caribbean and taught courses on Globalization, Transnationalism, and Modernity, Rethinking Human Rights, Contemporary Social Theory, Religious Nationalism, Race and Empire, and the Anthropology of Religion.
Topics
- Is this Justice? The International Criminal Court and its Challenges in Africa Questions of Crime
- Islam and Religious Politics in Northern Nigeria Crime and Cultural Difference Constitutionality in Question
- Religious and Legal Freedoms in the Americas Religious Revitalizations and the Problem with Marginality Race, Ethnicity, Religion
- The Challenges with Social Difference Race and Radical Politics in America Globalization and Racial Politics
- Globalization
- Transnationalism
- Modernity
- Rethinking Human Rights
- Contemporary Social Theory
- Religious Nationalism
- Race and Empire
- The Anthropology of Religion
- International (criminal) law
- Globalization and Social Change
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Title:Mapping Yorùbá NetworksSubtitle:Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational CommunitiesAuthor:Kamari ClarkePublisher:Duke University PressBook:Paperback, 384 pagesISBN:978-08-223-3342-5Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of Òyótúnjí African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yorùbá Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, Òyótúnjí is a Yorùbá revivalist community founded in 1970. 'Mapping Yorùbá Networks' is an innovative ethnography of Òyótúnjí and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yorùbá òrìsà voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. Drawing on several years of multisited fieldwork in the United States and Nigeria, Kamari Maxine Clarke describes Òyótúnjí in vivid detail—the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices—and explores how ideas of what constitutes the Yorùbá past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary Yorùbá transatlantic religious networks and the post-1970s institutionalization of roots heritage in American social life.
Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of Òyótúnjí Village's religious and tourist economy. She discusses how the community generates income through the sale of prophetic divinatory consultations, African market souvenirs — such as cloth, books, candles, and carvings — and fees for community-based tours and dining services. Clarke accompanied Òyótúnjí villagers to Nigeria, and she describes how these heritage travelers often returned home feeling that despite the separation of their ancestors from Africa as a result of transatlantic slavery, they — more than the Nigerian Yorùbá — are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great Òyó Empire of the Yorùbá people. 'Mapping Yorùbá Networks' is a unique look at the political economy of homeland identification and the transnational construction and legitimization of ideas such as authenticity, ancestry, blackness, and tradition. -
Title:Globalization and RaceSubtitle:Transformations in the Cultural Production of BlacknessEditors:Deborah Thomas and Kamari ClarkePublisher:Duke University PressBook:Paperback, 424 pagesISBN:978-08-223-3772-0Kamari 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.
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