The violence of diaspora: Governmentality, class cultures, and circulations

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 103, 2009, Pages 83-104

  Thomas, Deborah A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 64249134183     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2008-032     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward the History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1966)
2. and The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
3. For more on varieties of black Marxism, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000);
4. and Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
5. Discussions of other forms of internationalism and pan-Africanism include Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007);
6. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003);
7. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in America, 1900-1932 (New York: Verso, 1998);
8. Erik McDuffie, "'[She] Devoted Twenty Minutes Condemning All Other Forms of Government but the Soviet': Black Women Radicals in the Garvey Movement and in the Left during the 1920s," in Diasporic Africa: A Reader, ed. Michael A. Gomez (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 219-50;
9. Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
10. St. Clair Drake, "The Black Diaspora in Pan-African Perspective," Black Scholar 7 (1975): 2-14;
11. and "Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism," in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph E. Harris (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 341-402.
12. Hazel Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (New York: Verso, 1999);
13. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005);
14. "Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy," in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. Chandra T. Mohanty and Alexander (New York: Routledge, 1997), 63-100;
15. and "Redefining Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offences Bill of Trinidad and Tobago," in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra T. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 133-52;
16. Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
17. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
18. I am calling the youth "gunmen" here - an anonymous and ominous term - as that is how they would come to be described in the newspaper and radio reports of the murder. Yet, as in many small-scale face-to-face communities, these youth are known to people, and their families are long-standing community members. In fact, one of the gang leaders (who has since been assassinated) participated in a theater group I ran briefly out of the community center in the village.
19. A "nine night" is a Jamaican funerary ritual, an extended wake that takes place for nine nights after death during which time mourners sit up all night to celebrate the life of the deceased with food, music, and (often) drumming.
20. Glenroy Sinclair, "Thugs Torch Family of Four - Ten-Year-Old's Wail Dies in Blaze," Daily Gleaner, October 6, 2005.
21. Betty Ann, Blaine, "Death and the Death of Outrage," Jamaica Observer, October 11, 2005; Cedric Wilson, "Broken Windows and Young Minds," Sunday Gleaner, October 16, 2005;
22. Garth Rattray, "Are We Dying in Vain?" Daily Gleaner, October 11, 2005.
23. "A National Security Strategy for Jamaica," Sunday Gleaner, May 7, 2006;
24. Hermione McKenzie, qtd. in Glenroy Sinclair, "Gunmen Murder Six Women in Four Days - One Hundred and Nineteen Since January," Daily Gleaner, September 29, 2005.
25. Similar formulations were given in Phyllis Thomas, "Reversing the Culture of Violence in Jamaica," Sunday Gleaner, May 2, 2004;
26. in Barry Chevannes, Learning to Be a Man: Culture, Socialization, and Gender Identity in Five Caribbean Communities (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2001);
27. and in "Why Jamaican Men Rape," Sunday Gleaner, March 19, 2006.
28. On the development of garrison communities, see Carl Stone, Class, State, and Democracy in Jamaica (New York: Praeger, 1986);
29. National Committee on Political Tribalism (Kingston: Government of Jamaica, Constitutional Reform Unit, 1997);
30. Barry Chevannes, "The Formation of Garrison Communities" (paper presented at the symposium "Grassroots Development and the State of the Nation," University of the West Indies at Mona, November 16-17, 1992);
31. Carlene Edie, Democracy by Default: Dependency and Clientelism in Jamaica (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1991);
32. and Carl Stone, Democracy and Clientelism in Jamaica (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1980);
33. Carl Stone, "Crime and Violence: Socio-political Implications," in Crime and Violence: Causes and Solutions, ed. Peter Phillips and Judith Wedderburn (Mona, Jamaica: Department of Government, University of the West Indies, 19-48)
34. Bernard Headley, A Spade Is Still a Spade: Essays on Crime and the Politics of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: LMH, 2002).
35. Christopher Charles, "Garrison Communities as Counter Societies: The Case of the 1998 Zeeks' Riot in Jamaica," Ideaz 1 (2002): 29-43;
36. Horace Levy, Urban Poverty and Violence in Jamaica: Report on Research (Mona, Jamaica: Center for Population, Community, and Social Change, Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of the West Indies, 1995), 43;
37. The quote is from National Committee on Political Tribalism, 12.
38. On the transformation of gang violence, see Stone, Crime and Violence;
39. Anthony Harriott, "The Changing Social Organization of Crime and Criminals in Jamaica," Caribbean Quarterly 42 (1996): 61-81;
40. and "The Jamaican Crime Problem: New Developments and New Challenges for Public Policy," in Understanding Crime in Jamaica: New Challenges for Public Policy, ed. Anthony Harriot (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 1-12;
41. Levy, Urban Poverty and Violence in Jamaica;
42. Charles, "Garrison Communities as Counter Societies," 32;
43. Headley, A Spade Is Still a Spade, 72.
44. On the spatial effects of violence, see Alan L. Eyre, "Political Violence and Urban Geography in Kingston, Jamaica," Geographical Review 74 (1984): 24-37;
45. and "The Effects of Political Terrorism on the Residential Location of the Poor in the Kingston Urban Region, Jamaica, West Indies," Urban Geography 7 (1986): 227-42.
46. Jamaican murder statistics are from Tara Abrahams-Clivio, "Let's Renounce the Title of Murder Capital," Jamaica Observer, October 20, 2005. To compare, the murder rate in the United States in 2005 was 5.6 per 100,000 (Crime in the United States [Washington, DC: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, 2005], www.fbi.gov/ucr/05ucis/)
47. in Canada, it was 2 per 100,000 (The Daily, November 8, 2006);
48. and in England (and Wales), it was 1.4 per 100,000 people (Alison Walker, Chris Kershaw, and Sian Nicholar, "Crime in England and Wales, 2005/2006," Home Office Statistical Bulletin, 2006, www.crimereduction.gov.uk/statistics/statistics50.htm [accessed September 4, 2007]).
49. The latter figure is a count of murders occurring in England and Wales and includes the fifty-two victims of the July 7 subway bombings. See also Mark Beckford, "Murder on the Increase," Jamaica Gleaner, August 24, 2007.
50. David Scott, "The 'Culture of Violence' Fallacy," Small Axe 1 (1997): 146.
51. Karen Brodkin, "Global Capitalism: What's Race Got to Do with It?" American Ethnologist 27 (2000): 237-56.
52. Patrick Wintour and Vikram Dodd, "Blair Blames Spate of Murders on Black Culture," Guardian, April 12, 2007.
53. There is, of course, a long history to this kind of discourse in Britain, a discourse that proliferated especially after the report on the Brixton Riots written by Sir Leslie Scarman (The Scarman Report: The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 1981, Report of an Inquiry [New York: Penguin, 1981]).
54. See also Paul Gilroy, "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). I thank Mary Chamberlain and Faith Smith for directing me to these sources.
55. See John Chuckman, "City at Risk," chuckman.blog.ca/?tag=guns (accessed October 2, 2006);
56. John Macfarlane, the editor of Toronto Life,
57. qtd. in Lorrie Goldstein, "Stop Blaming Jamaicans for Gun Crime," Toronto Sun, May 7, 2006;
58. Eugene Rivers, "The Sins of the Fathers Are Visited on Black Youth," Globe and Mail, December 2, 2005;
59. Bruce Garvey, "Jamaica's 'Born fi Dead' Culture," National Post, October 27, 2005.
60. On the animalization of black migrants in early-twentieth-century Cuba, see Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chap. 3.
61. See Carole Nagengast, "Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State," Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 109-36, for an early review essay on the topic.
62. Brent Hayes Edwards, "The Uses of Diaspora," Social Text 19 (2001): 49, 55, 52, 55.
63. See Kevin A. Yelvington, "The War in Ethiopia and Trinidad, 1935-1936," in The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on Postemancipation Social and Cultural History, ed. Bridget Brereton and Yelvington (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 189-225, for a more nuanced discussion of how the question of origins, or of ethnic subjectivity, is dialectically and mutually constituted by the question of class.
64. St. Clair Drake, "Black Diaspora in Pan-African Perspective," 11.
65. Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper, 1941).
66. See also Kevin A. Yelvington, "The Invention of Africa in Latin America and the Caribbean: Political Discourse and Anthropological Praxis, 1920-1940," in Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora, ed. Yelvington (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2006), 35-82.
67. Other anthropologists critiqued the notions of acculturation and syncretism and the typology Herskovits developed. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price argued that instead of identifying particular cultural traits that might link New World blacks to African societies, it would be better to conceptualize these linkages as "unconscious 'grammatical' principles" and to analyze the political economy surrounding peoples' efforts to make their worlds by holding on to particular cultural practices and by adapting others to their new circumstances (The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective [Boston: Beacon, 1992], 9). Indeed, Herskovits's vindicationist research agenda and ideas were not politically popular during the 1930s and the 1940s, when many African American leaders contending with the failure of Reconstruction were emphasizing not cultural difference from the American mainstream, but cultural similarity to promote the goals of assimilation, integration, and the extension of the rights of citizenship to the descendants of slaves. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, Herskovits's ideas were picked up again and applied to the study not only of religion and expressive culture but also of patterns of land tenure, inheritance, and family formation.
68. The quotes about the changing language of race are from Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 162.
69. For similar analyses of these transformations, see Laura Curran, "The Culture of Race, Class, and Poverty: The Emergence of a Cultural Discourse in Early Cold War Social Work (1946-1963)," Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 30 (2003): 18
70. and Kamari M. Clarke, Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
71. On the development of normative ideas on family formation, see Lara Putnam, "Parenthood at the End of Empire: Great Britain and Its Caribbean Colonies, 1910-1940" (paper presented at the Latin American Labor History Conference, Duke University, Durham, NC, May 4-5, 2007),
72. and Roderick A. Ferguson, "Nightmares of the Heteronormative: Go Tell It on the Mountain versus An American Dilemma," in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 82-109;
73. and Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 157.
74. The quote about American capitalism and the working class is from Anthony Marcus, "The Culture of Poverty Revisited: Bringing Back the Working Class," Anthropologica 47 (2005): 47;
75. Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962; New York: Penguin, 1981);
76. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963).
77. The quote is from Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 3.
78. Many black intellectuals rued these changes, E. Franklin Frazier chief among them. While Frazier himself deployed a culturalist frame for viewing African American family life (despite the fact that he also emphasized sociostructural factors in his analysis of African American family organization), he saw in the move away from internationalist anticolonial politics a diminished inclination to critique Western society and culture. He also felt that the turn from an analytic framework that privileged the language of political economy inhibited the elaboration of a model of black modernity that was inspired, at least in part, by African independence (see Kevin Gaines, "E. Franklin Frazier's Revenge: Anticolonialism, Nonalignment, and Black Intellectuals' Critiques of Western Culture," American Literary History 17 [2005]: 506-29).
79. Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie - written and first published in France before being published in the United States in 1957 - articulated as scathing a critique of U.S. black middle-class intellectual and political leaders as did Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth of the newly postcolonial political leadership. Both saw in bourgeois nationalism a narrowing of focus and an emphasis on culture and assimilation, rather than an impetus toward the radical transformation of the relationships among black people, capitalism, and nation-states (E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class [New York: Free Press, 1957];
80. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington [New York: Grove, 1963]).
81. St. Clair Drake also identified the Cold War as inspiring a move away from internationalism, but he suggested that it was the success of anticolonial movements in Africa that played such a decisive role in turning African Americans away from coordinated political action. He argued that once African countries became nations, the sense of a unity of purpose fractured: "The period of uncomplicated united struggle to secure [African] independence from the white oppressor had ended for each colony as it became a nation. Diaspora blacks had to decide which of various political factions, if any, within the new nations they would support" (Drake, "Diaspora Studies and Pan-Africanism," 351).
82. It is also this antinationalist sense that pervades the use of diaspora within British cultural studies, though here we see the maintenance of explicit attention to class and political economy, at least until the publication of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). This is because within this context, diaspora became a way to identify the relationships between racism and British nationalism.
83. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 85-86.
84. On "Christian blacks," see Diane Austin-Broos, "Redefining the Moral Order: Interpretations of Christianity in Post-Emancipation Jamaica," in The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics, and Culture after Slavery, ed. Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 221-44.
85. On postemancipation village and family formation, see Catherine Hall, "Gender Politics and Imperial Politics: Rethinking the Histories of Empire," in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1995), 48-59;
86. and Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
87. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 85.
88. Putnam, "Parenthood at the End of Empire," 1.
89. For similar analyses of the way migration influenced family structure, see E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (1939; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966);
90. Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
91. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
92. M. G. Smith, introduction to My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica, by Edith Clarke (1957; London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), i-xliv;
93. Rhoda Reddock, Women, Labour, and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History (London: Zed, 1994).
94. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 85.
95. Ibid., 88;
96. Myrdal Gunnar, An American Problem: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944).
97. Thomas S. Simey, Welfare and Planning in the West Indies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946);
98. and Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me;
99. Madeline Kerr, Personality and Conflict in Jamaica (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1952).
100. For early family studies in the United States, see John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937);
101. Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (New York: Viking, 1939);
102. Oliver Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948);
103. Alison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941);
104. Lloyd Warner, Buford Junker, and Walter Adams, Color and Human Nature: Negro Personality Development in a Northern City (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1941).
105. In fact, Simey was himself encouraged to read the sociological literature on African American family structures that was emergent in the United States at the time (Lara Putnam, personal communication, October 12, 2007). For modifications of earlier family research, see Robert Dirks and Virginia Kerns, "Mating Patterns and Adaptive Change in Rum Bay, 1823-1970," Social and Economic Studies 25 (1976): 34-54;
106. Nancie Gonzalez, "Towards a Definition of Matrifocality," in Afro-American Anthropology: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Norman Whitten and John Szwed (New York: Free Press, 1970), 231-44;
107. Sidney Greenfield, English Rustics in Black Skin: A Study of Modern Family Forms in a Pre-industrial Society (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1966);
108. Hyman Rodman, "On Understanding Lower-Class Behavior," Social and Economic Studies 8 (1959): 441-50;
109. and Lower-Class Families: The Culture of Poverty in Negro Trinidad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971);
110. Hymie Rubenstein, "Conjugal Behavior and Parental Role Flexibility in an Afro-Caribean Village," Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 17 (1980): 331-37;
111. and "Caribbean Family and Household Organization: Some Conceptual Clarifications," Journal of Comparative Family Studies 14 (1983): 283-98;
112. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
113. A more recent perspective has also developed that returns to Herskovits's position that West Indian family forms are modifications of West African forms. See, for example, Virginia Kerns, Women and the Ancestors: Black Carib Kinship and Ritual (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983);
114. Niara Sudarkasa, "African and Afro-American Family Structure" in Anthropology for the Nineties, ed. Johnnetta Cole (New York: Free Press, 1988), 182-210;
115. Constance Sutton, "Africans in the Diaspora: Changing Continuities in West Indian and West African Sex/Gender Systems" (paper presented at the "New Perspectives on Caribbean Studies: Toward the Twenty-First Century" conference, August 29, 1984.
116. Reddock, Women, Labour, and Politics, 225.
117. For mid-1950s U.S. research, see Judith Blake, Family Structure in Jamaica: The Social Context of Reproduction (Glencoe, IL: Free Press,1961);
118. J. Mayone Stycos and Kurt Back, The Control of Human Fertility in Jamaica (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964).
119. For critical perspectives on this research, see Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 178,
120. and Ferguson, Aberrations in Black.
121. Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (1959; New York: Basic Books, 1975);
122. and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty - San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1965).
123. The quotes are from La Vida, xxvi.
124. See also The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 1965).
125. Of course, Lewis's ideas have been widely criticized. Anthropologists and others have taken issue with his use of the culture concept, with the ways his own data sometimes contradicted his theoretical assertions, with the ways he contributed to a racialization and sexualization of poor people, and with the sense that despite his various disclaimers, he ultimately took up the culture of poverty thesis as a way to blame the poor for their own poverty and marginalization. For these critiques, see Eleanor Leacock, ed., The Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971);
126. Rodman Lower-Class Families;
127. Charles Valentine, Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968);
128. Briggs, Reproducing Empire; Micaela DiLeonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998);
129. also, "Book Review: The Children of Sanchez, Pedro Martinez, and La Vida by Oscar Lewis," Current Anthropology 8, no. 5 (1967): 480-500.
130. While Lewis's own solutions for poverty tended to emphasize collective action and political protest geared toward achieving the rights and responsibilities of true citizenship, those who took his ideas and ran with them were seen as offering up solutions that emphasized self-help and government nonintervention (see Lewis, La Vida, xlvi, l).
131. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 85.
132. Carla Freeman, "The 'Reputation' of Neoliberalism," American Ethnologist 34 (2007): 252-67.
133. Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others," in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Lubiano (New York: Vintage, 1998), 232-52.