In this paper I argue that, due to the influence of Rastafari culture and beliefs, my interlocutors, members of the Rastafari community in Puerto Rico, are selecting a Black racialized identity for themselves—even though they have the social privilege not to do so. In doing so, they are critiquing how Blackness and Black identity formation is understood in Puerto Rico. By refusing said privilege and choosing what is largely understood to be a marginalized identity, they are defying Puerto Rican racial constructions as well as Eurocentric racial hierarchies. They present instead a number of counternarratives: (1) they acknowledge the reality and gravity of racism in Puerto Rico, (2) they favor and support a standard of beauty that is Afrocentric as opposed to the typical Eurocentric standard prevalent in Puerto Rico, and (3) they consider a Black/African identification to be a practice in empowerment and not suppression.
{"title":"Dios en Carne: Puerto Rican Rastas Choosing Black / Refusing White","authors":"Omar Ramadan‐Santiago","doi":"10.1111/traa.12237","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12237","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I argue that, due to the influence of Rastafari culture and beliefs, my interlocutors, members of the Rastafari community in Puerto Rico, are selecting a Black racialized identity for themselves—even though they have the social privilege not to do so. In doing so, they are critiquing how Blackness and Black identity formation is understood in Puerto Rico. By refusing said privilege and choosing what is largely understood to be a marginalized identity, they are defying Puerto Rican racial constructions as well as Eurocentric racial hierarchies. They present instead a number of counternarratives: (1) they acknowledge the reality and gravity of racism in Puerto Rico, (2) they favor and support a standard of beauty that is Afrocentric as opposed to the typical Eurocentric standard prevalent in Puerto Rico, and (3) they consider a Black/African identification to be a practice in empowerment and not suppression.","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"107 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48176425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Everyday embodiments of Black cowboy masculinities are balancing acts that attend to systems of power in racialized spaces. These practices create a space to consider how Black men discuss different ways they understand their positionality in the US hierarchy of racialized patriarchy. This article examines how Black cowboy performances are a balancing act that becomes a conversation about “coolness” as a citational practice. Coolness is also a method with implications for Black male legibility in mainstream country‐western rodeo. For Black cowboys, the definition of “cool” is not textually written to reveal rules or elements for testing. Performance and storytelling—traditional African and African American cultural practices—provide connections to how Black cowboys “play” with positionalities and ideologies of insider/outsider knowledge. This ethnography presents ways that one cowboy communicates how “things aren't always what they seem to be.” It advocates for more humanistic representations of Black masculinity while shifting the narrative frame of unmarked heroes, the cowboys.
{"title":"Cowboy Cool: A Professional Black Cowboy’s Perspective","authors":"Myeshia C. Babers","doi":"10.1111/traa.12241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12241","url":null,"abstract":"Everyday embodiments of Black cowboy masculinities are balancing acts that attend to systems of power in racialized spaces. These practices create a space to consider how Black men discuss different ways they understand their positionality in the US hierarchy of racialized patriarchy. This article examines how Black cowboy performances are a balancing act that becomes a conversation about “coolness” as a citational practice. Coolness is also a method with implications for Black male legibility in mainstream country‐western rodeo. For Black cowboys, the definition of “cool” is not textually written to reveal rules or elements for testing. Performance and storytelling—traditional African and African American cultural practices—provide connections to how Black cowboys “play” with positionalities and ideologies of insider/outsider knowledge. This ethnography presents ways that one cowboy communicates how “things aren't always what they seem to be.” It advocates for more humanistic representations of Black masculinity while shifting the narrative frame of unmarked heroes, the cowboys.","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"150 - 164"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41721538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
After Hurricane Maria had passed, Puerto Rico found itself in the eye of a media whirlwind due to governmental scandal and earthquakes; still, bomberas (women bomba practitioners) would continue organizing. This article examines how in the wake of catastrophe, and since its inception on sugar plantations in Puerto Rico, bombeando (practicing bomba) offers individual healing and prompts the mobilization of Afro–Puerto Ricans on the island and in the States. Bomba is thus a system of mutual relief, which offers a model of structural repair. I examine how bombera pedagogy is more than something to be applied to a genre of music and dance but a lifestyle and practice that acknowledges, repurposes, and releases wreckage of the embodied experience of colonial trauma. Drawing on practices of care in the Black feminist tradition, I deploy ethnography to render how bomba allows scholars to collectively reimagine and address interpersonal and infrastructural violence.
{"title":"“Yo la bomba no la bailé, la bomba yo la vivé” (I Didn’t Just Dance Bomba, I Lived It): The Pedagogy of Daily Puerto Rican Life, Black Feminist Praxis, and the Batey","authors":"Sarah Bruno","doi":"10.1111/traa.12242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12242","url":null,"abstract":"After Hurricane Maria had passed, Puerto Rico found itself in the eye of a media whirlwind due to governmental scandal and earthquakes; still, bomberas (women bomba practitioners) would continue organizing. This article examines how in the wake of catastrophe, and since its inception on sugar plantations in Puerto Rico, bombeando (practicing bomba) offers individual healing and prompts the mobilization of Afro–Puerto Ricans on the island and in the States. Bomba is thus a system of mutual relief, which offers a model of structural repair. I examine how bombera pedagogy is more than something to be applied to a genre of music and dance but a lifestyle and practice that acknowledges, repurposes, and releases wreckage of the embodied experience of colonial trauma. Drawing on practices of care in the Black feminist tradition, I deploy ethnography to render how bomba allows scholars to collectively reimagine and address interpersonal and infrastructural violence.","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"93 - 106"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48979069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice. HannaGarth and Ashanté M.Reese, eds. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 320 pp. (Cloth US$112.00; Paper US$28.00)","authors":"A. James","doi":"10.1111/traa.12235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12235","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49585119","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
constituents that include the book’s readers, torture survivors, a police superintendent, Chicago’s youth of color, future mayors of the city, and others. We are introduced to the egregious behavior of figures who have perpetrated torture, such as Jon Burge and Richard Zuley, but also the tenacity of Chicago’s communities of color who have resisted police violence. I was particularly moved by Ralph’s engagement with both the living and the dead, and his recognition that the living can serve as “messengers for the dead” (p. 120). The prose is consistently beautiful. For instance, Ralph develops the metaphor of the “torture tree” as “rooted in an enduring idea of threat that is foundational to life in the United States. Its trunk is the use-of-force continuum. Its branches are the police officers who personify this continuum. And its leaves are everyday incidents of police violence” (p. 2). The “black box” also emerges as a nuanced metaphor, representing a literal torture device used against prisoners. It is also a symbol of the open/ public secret of police brutality and a tool for the recovery and exposure of torture. Ralph uplifts the voices of grassroots groups such as We Charge Genocide. Ralph traces how this collective of Black youth from Chicago defied all odds to speak truth to power at the United Nations in Geneva in 2014, declaring, “We charge torture. We charge genocide” (p. 122). He emphasizes that every human has the right not to be tortured, regardless of any suspected criminal activity. Ralph takes his argument further, explicating how for Black Americans in Chicago who have been protesting police violence in the city since the 1890s, torture became a form of genocide. Ralph writes, “Deliberate exposure of African Americans to torture by our government is a form of genocide.... [T]o live a life of perpetual debilitation, to be subjected to ‘slow violence’ with no end in sight, is hardly to live at all. Having one’s humanity steadily annihilated, well, that is torture” (p. 104). The Torture Letters reveals the culture of silence and rationalization that enables this system to persist; so many Americans, including Black police officers, are complicit in statesanctioned violence. This book is a call for accountability and reparations. Ralph’s vision for racial and social justice is also expansive, reminding us that “the damaging effects of the torture tree do not stop at Chicago’s borders. The torture tree makes the entire world less safe” (p. 153). He connects torture’s transnational branches to anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, “the militarization of the police and the policification of the military” (p. 150), and US violence within its borders and beyond. Ralph captures this nexus with the experience of a Mauritanian man, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was tortured at the hands of a former Chicago police officer as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. In 2020 Ralph produced a powerful short animated film based on his open letters and published it as
{"title":"Sweetness in the Blood: Race, Risk, and Type 2 Diabetes. James Doucet‐Battle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. xviii + 228 pp. (Cloth US$100.00; Paper US$25.00)","authors":"Nikhil Pandhi","doi":"10.1111/traa.12236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12236","url":null,"abstract":"constituents that include the book’s readers, torture survivors, a police superintendent, Chicago’s youth of color, future mayors of the city, and others. We are introduced to the egregious behavior of figures who have perpetrated torture, such as Jon Burge and Richard Zuley, but also the tenacity of Chicago’s communities of color who have resisted police violence. I was particularly moved by Ralph’s engagement with both the living and the dead, and his recognition that the living can serve as “messengers for the dead” (p. 120). The prose is consistently beautiful. For instance, Ralph develops the metaphor of the “torture tree” as “rooted in an enduring idea of threat that is foundational to life in the United States. Its trunk is the use-of-force continuum. Its branches are the police officers who personify this continuum. And its leaves are everyday incidents of police violence” (p. 2). The “black box” also emerges as a nuanced metaphor, representing a literal torture device used against prisoners. It is also a symbol of the open/ public secret of police brutality and a tool for the recovery and exposure of torture. Ralph uplifts the voices of grassroots groups such as We Charge Genocide. Ralph traces how this collective of Black youth from Chicago defied all odds to speak truth to power at the United Nations in Geneva in 2014, declaring, “We charge torture. We charge genocide” (p. 122). He emphasizes that every human has the right not to be tortured, regardless of any suspected criminal activity. Ralph takes his argument further, explicating how for Black Americans in Chicago who have been protesting police violence in the city since the 1890s, torture became a form of genocide. Ralph writes, “Deliberate exposure of African Americans to torture by our government is a form of genocide.... [T]o live a life of perpetual debilitation, to be subjected to ‘slow violence’ with no end in sight, is hardly to live at all. Having one’s humanity steadily annihilated, well, that is torture” (p. 104). The Torture Letters reveals the culture of silence and rationalization that enables this system to persist; so many Americans, including Black police officers, are complicit in statesanctioned violence. This book is a call for accountability and reparations. Ralph’s vision for racial and social justice is also expansive, reminding us that “the damaging effects of the torture tree do not stop at Chicago’s borders. The torture tree makes the entire world less safe” (p. 153). He connects torture’s transnational branches to anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, “the militarization of the police and the policification of the military” (p. 150), and US violence within its borders and beyond. Ralph captures this nexus with the experience of a Mauritanian man, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was tortured at the hands of a former Chicago police officer as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. In 2020 Ralph produced a powerful short animated film based on his open letters and published it as","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"169 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43833257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Boboshanti mansion, born of a highly specific moment of marginalization and radical displacement in the 1950s and ’60s in Kingston, Jamaica, remains among the most pious, militant, and reclusive sects of Rastafari. Through the voices of its key musician‐proponents, Bobo philosophy has had a lasting impact on reggae and dancehall music production in Jamaica and internationally. Adopted and adapted in and around Accra since the millennium, this socioreligious practice and now musical tradition has had a similar impact within and beyond the growing local reggae‐dancehall industry in Ghana. Its largely male, often Muslim and youthful proponents draw on a contentious mix of confrontational “judgment,” “fire‐burning” politics, and ascetic living to speak across religion, ethnicity, and class in an already fervently religious and politically conservative Ghanaian social sphere. Drawn from ethnographic research conducted between 2013 and 2017 in Accra, and through the symbols of the “turban” and the “crown”—forms of adornment and social posture with which Bobos distinguish themselves—this short article will briefly engage the narrative threads of select local Bobo‐inspired dancehall artists and activists, to explore the politics of music making and spiritual community building in Ghana.
{"title":"Turban Crown: Boboshanti Arts of Resistance in Ghanaian Reggae‐Dancehall","authors":"Osei Alleyne","doi":"10.1111/traa.12240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12240","url":null,"abstract":"The Boboshanti mansion, born of a highly specific moment of marginalization and radical displacement in the 1950s and ’60s in Kingston, Jamaica, remains among the most pious, militant, and reclusive sects of Rastafari. Through the voices of its key musician‐proponents, Bobo philosophy has had a lasting impact on reggae and dancehall music production in Jamaica and internationally. Adopted and adapted in and around Accra since the millennium, this socioreligious practice and now musical tradition has had a similar impact within and beyond the growing local reggae‐dancehall industry in Ghana. Its largely male, often Muslim and youthful proponents draw on a contentious mix of confrontational “judgment,” “fire‐burning” politics, and ascetic living to speak across religion, ethnicity, and class in an already fervently religious and politically conservative Ghanaian social sphere. Drawn from ethnographic research conducted between 2013 and 2017 in Accra, and through the symbols of the “turban” and the “crown”—forms of adornment and social posture with which Bobos distinguish themselves—this short article will briefly engage the narrative threads of select local Bobo‐inspired dancehall artists and activists, to explore the politics of music making and spiritual community building in Ghana.","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"122 - 132"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48016255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Antiblackness\u0000 . Moon‐Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. v + 381 pp. (Paper US$29.95; Cloth US$109.95; E‐Book US$16.17)","authors":"Tiffany N. Peacock","doi":"10.1111/traa.12233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12233","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46623484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I offer the “imperial optic” as an ethnographic approach to observe and analyze the ongoing impact of US empire on Pakistani‐origin youth. Drawing from twenty‐four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore, New York City, and online (2013–19) with two groups of participants—(1) Pakistani Diaspora Muslim students at a public college in the United States and (2) Pakistani Pashtun Muslim scholarship students at a private university in Pakistan—I analyze how US war policies shaped student access and mobility within each respective institution of higher education. Although I worked primarily on two urban college campuses—far from the typically imagined “theaters of war”—my findings demonstrate how US imperialism was a definitive feature shaping college life in both settings. I show how students encountered US regimes of imperial racialization as part of their educational pathways and argue that localized systems of stratified difference in Lahore and NYC are incorporated into the Global War on Terror and its attendant policies. These global processes of imperial racialization between two otherwise seemingly diffuse educational contexts become observable when deploying the “imperial optic” approach to multisited ethnography.
{"title":"The Imperial Optic: Mapping the Impact of the Global War on Terror on Higher Education in the US and Pakistan","authors":"Mariam Durrani","doi":"10.1111/traa.12230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12230","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I offer the “imperial optic” as an ethnographic approach to observe and analyze the ongoing impact of US empire on Pakistani‐origin youth. Drawing from twenty‐four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore, New York City, and online (2013–19) with two groups of participants—(1) Pakistani Diaspora Muslim students at a public college in the United States and (2) Pakistani Pashtun Muslim scholarship students at a private university in Pakistan—I analyze how US war policies shaped student access and mobility within each respective institution of higher education. Although I worked primarily on two urban college campuses—far from the typically imagined “theaters of war”—my findings demonstrate how US imperialism was a definitive feature shaping college life in both settings. I show how students encountered US regimes of imperial racialization as part of their educational pathways and argue that localized systems of stratified difference in Lahore and NYC are incorporated into the Global War on Terror and its attendant policies. These global processes of imperial racialization between two otherwise seemingly diffuse educational contexts become observable when deploying the “imperial optic” approach to multisited ethnography.","PeriodicalId":44069,"journal":{"name":"Transforming Anthropology","volume":"30 1","pages":"66 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":1.4,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45733330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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