Kamari Maxine Clarke – författare

By taking up the challenge of documenting how human rights values are embedded in rule of law movements to produce a new language of international justice that competes with a range of other formations, this book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices. These micropractices include speech acts that revere the protection of international rights, citation references to treaty documents, the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, demonstrations of religiosity that make explicit the piety of religious subjects, and ritual practices of forgiveness that involve the invocation of ancestral religious cosmologies - all practices that detail the ways that justice is made real.

By taking up the challenge of documenting how human rights values are embedded in rule of law movements to produce a new language of international justice that competes with a range of other formations, this book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices. These micropractices include speech acts that revere the protection of international rights, citation references to treaty documents, the brokering of human rights agendas, the rewriting of national constitutions, demonstrations of religiosity that make explicit the piety of religious subjects, and ritual practices of forgiveness that involve the invocation of ancestral religious cosmologies - all practices that detail the ways that justice is made real.

Three 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.

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 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.Contributors. Robert L. Adams, Lee D. Baker, Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Tina M. Campt, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Raymond Codrington, Grant Farred, Kesha Fikes, Isar Godreau, Ariana Hernandez-Reguant, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, John L. Jackson Jr., Oneka LaBennett, Naomi Pabst, Lena Sawyer, Deborah A. Thomas

Mirrors of Justice is a groundbreaking study of the meanings of and possibilities for justice in the contemporary world. The book brings together a group of both prominent and emerging scholars to reconsider the relationships between justice, international law, culture, power, and history through case studies of a wide range of justice processes. The book's eighteen authors examine the ambiguities of justice in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia through critical empirical and historical chapters. The introduction makes an important contribution to our understanding of the multiplicity of justice in the twenty-first century by providing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes the book's chapters with leading-edge literatures on human rights, legal pluralism, and international law.

Since its inception in 2001, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been met with resistance by various African states and their leaders, who see the court as a new iteration of colonial violence and control. In Affective Justice Kamari Maxine Clarke explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Drawing on fieldwork in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, sites of postelection violence in Kenya, and Boko Haram's circuits in Northern Nigeria, Clarke formulates the concept of affective justice-an emotional response to competing interpretations of justice-to trace how affect becomes manifest in judicial practices. By detailing the effects of the ICC’s all-African indictments, she outlines how affective responses to these call into question the "objectivity" of the ICC’s mission to protect those victimized by violence and prosecute perpetrators of those crimes. In analyzing the effects of such cases, Clarke provides a fuller theorization of how people articulate what justice is and the mechanisms through which they do so.