Search

The subject of this article is the reinscription of a new diaspora in the public sphere by which governments and multilateral institutions are mobilizing. The following argues that these kinds of mobilizations have had the effect of subverting traditional approaches to diasporic linkage that in African and African American studies have privileged trans-Atlantic slavery and its consequent social dislocations and led to the marginalization of other forced and voluntary diasporic linkages. As this article argues, one such movement often excluded from popular diasporic theories in the Black Atlantic region represents new types of economic linkages being deployed alongside various UN stakeholders and members of business communities of the Global South. These formations carry the mission of developing concrete goals to end global poverty through eradicating war and developing new diasporic projects that will accelerate economic growth in the South. The author calls for a rethinking of the contemporary processes that are at play in diasporic invocations of a post-9/11 period and shows how the call for nationals abroad to invest in their “home” countries is being used to create new diasporic linkages. In this regard, the article introduces the notion of humanitarian diasporas in an effort to rethink transatlantic slavery as the central basis for conceptualizing the starting place of African diasporic theorizing in the North American Academy.

The African focus on the International Criminal Court (ICC) rule of law movement is far from incidental. It has everything to do with the identification of particular crimes as of gravest concern to humanity, crimes which, when viewed in political terms, foster cooperation by the majority of state parties. This article explores the workings of a global elite of liberalist lawyers and policy makers engaged in establishing what particular types of violence are considered part of an international moral and political agenda. I argue the ICC's emphasis on "command responsibility," conceptions of "justice," and human rights overlooks colonial history and its continuing postcolonial effects and the geo-political implications of resource competition.

This article explores the making of social membership in U.S.-based deterritorialized contexts and interrogate the ways that black-Atlantic diasporic imaginaries are intertwined to produce transnational notions of linkage. In charting a genealogy of a transnational orisa movement that came of age in a moment of black-nationalist protest, I pose questions about how such a study should be understood in relation to ethnographies of global networks. I argue that, despite their seemingly thin representations of broad forms of linkage, transnational orisa networks produce culturally portable practices that articulate important transformations: They shape institutions through which new forms of religious knowledge are producing significant breaks with older forms.

Samples of illicit amphetamine seized by Police and Customs in England and Wales are routinely submitted to the Drugs Intelligence Laboratory at Aldermaston. Solvent extraction is used to separate synthetic impurities from the amphetamine and common cutting agents. The gas chromatogram provides an impurity profile. Around 4000 samples have been analysed in the past 4 years. These profiles have been subjectively classified into 10 major groups. Comparison of Police and Customs seizures has shown that, during 1993, nearly all amphetamine in the UK had been imported from The Netherlands.

Introduction. Understanding the multiplicity of justice Mark Goodale and Kamari Maxine Clarke 1. Beyond compliance: toward an anthropological understanding of international justice Sally Engle Merry Part I. Justice and the Geographies of International Law: 2. Postcolonial denial: why the European Court of Human Rights finds it so difficult to acknowledge racism Marie-Benedicte Dembour 3. Proleptic justice: the threat of investigation as a deterrent to human rights abuses in Cote d'Ivoire Michael McGovern 4. Global governmentality: the case of transnational adoption Signe Howell 5. Implementing the International Criminal Court Treaty in Africa: the role of NGOs and government agencies in constitutional reform Benson Chinedu Olugbuo 6. Measuring justice: internal conflict over the World Bank's empirical approach to human rights Galit A. Sarfaty Part II. Justice, Power, and Narratives of Everyday Life: 7. The victim deserving of global justice: power, caution, and recovering individuals Susan F. Hirsch 8. Recognition, reciprocity, and justice: Melanesian reflections on the rights of relationships Joel Robbins 9. Irreconcilable differences? Shari'ah, human rights, and family code reform in contemporary Morocco Amy Elizabeth Young 10. The production of 'forgiveness': God, justice, and state failure in postwar Sierra Leone Rosalind Shaw Part III. Justice, Memory, and the Politics of History: 11. Impunity and paranoia: writing histories of Indonesian violence Elizabeth Drexler 12. National security, WMD, and the selective pursuit of justice at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 1946-8 Jeanne Guillemin 13. Justice and the League of Nations minority regime Jane K. Cowan 14. Commissioning truth, constructing silences: the Peruvian TRC and the other truths of 'terrorists' Lisa J. Laplante and Kimberly Theidon Epilogue. The words we use: justice, human rights, and the sense of injustice Laura Nader.

In the midst of the expansion of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its African-based prosecutions, Africa has witnessed rapid religious recomposition in recent decades marked by new scales of religious organization, new directional flows of influence, assertive new theologies, and intensified public presences. This chapter focuses on the ways that different forms of religious ethical value are central to both the human rights principles shaping the rule of law movement and to key revivalist Muslim commitments in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Here I examine a particular West African–Islamic politicolegal trajectory and situate it within the recent expansion of the rule of law. At the heart of this chapter is an inquiry into what new tensions are emerging at the intersections of “religious” and political projects. How, I ask, do current radical religious contestations within African polities – or between religious doctrines and secular legal codes – inform wider theoretical and legal debates on the ambiguous conceptual groundings of the “secular”; on rights and duties; and on the presumptive norms of liberalist citizenship central to its production of individual personhood? How does a different rendering of obligation and authority produce a politics of incommensurability that is beyond liberalist recognition? THE ICC: A MOVEMENT IN THE MAKING In liberalist circles until the mid-twentieth century, the international notion of “rights” was predominately associated with domestic issues and rested on the nation-state as the grantor and protector of rights.

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.

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

The global reach of international law is now becoming relevant to the micromanagement of daily life. In postcolonial African states, everyday actions and their meanings are being opened up by the expansion of national jurisdiction into international jurisdiction. In relation to these changing technologies of managing shifting regimes of power, this article explores the ways that the spectacle of the rule of law is linked to the spectacle of capitalism. By examining the workings of victim and witness testimonies in the Special Court of Sierra Leone, I examine the ways that spectacles of law and articulations of suffering displace the realities of root causes of violence and the ways that these spectacles parse criminal responsibility. From rebel leaders spreading violence to the plunder of natural resources to child soldiers at once both victims and perpetrators, I detail the discursive crafting of the “African warlord” and the consequent specter of the victim by showing how law and justice are anchored in processes and concepts that often mask their normative underpinnings. Through its focus on victims’ justice and not on the consumerism that fuels production, the Special Court of Sierra Leone serves not only as the author of new legal tenets of criminal responsibility, but also as a key mechanism of power through which the law obscures the conditions that affect its making. As such, like other spectacles of power, the law is able to make its labor invisible, while displacing human action and replacing it with spectacular performances that affirm the rule of law that gains its force. It obscures its making not just through the staging and performances of rites, but also through the narrative strategies that consolidate an affective regime of suffering within which contemporary humanitarianism gains its power.

Santeriafrom Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. George Brandon. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. 207 pp. (Cloth US$35.00; Paper US$11.95)

Keywords: history, power, geotemporality, race, Yoruba, [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji, African villageRed blood splattered throughout the oval-shaped room. Robed in his best African clothes and by pulling the trigger of a borrowed shotgun, one of [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji's young men had fallen to his death. The news of the suicide rang throughout the community. His last words inscribed on paper expressed how much he tried and wanted them to be proud of him, how much he hurt and how much he could not deal with the addictions that haunted him, how much he continued to fail those who he loved the most. His solution saddened the residents as they scrambled to explain how it could have happened, wishing that they had only paid more attention to the signs; if only they had tried harder. The lack of experience dealing with death in [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji, a three generation-old community, left residents with a numbing powerlessness and malevolent curiosity about how the leaders would deal with a life taken in this way.The emotional inclination of many, regardless of the cause of death, was to honour with a special ritual the life of their friend and "brother in the religion." During the first few hours members of the [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji community scurried in search of the appropriate ritual procedure. They called the city of Beauport authorities, consulted the ancestors through the use of divinatory rituals, telephoned knowledgeable practitioners outside of [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji, and consulted various historical texts in which Yoruba traditions were documented. Although in the midst of a crisis, they not only sought the advice of their ancestors by conducting divination readings to determine the course of action, but they conducted literary research in search of the protocol of "traditional" burial practices among the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria who committed suicide.Over the course of the development of the black cultural nationalist movement, as it moved from Harlem, New York to South Carolina, African Americans disillusioned with Christianity converted to Yoruba practices in an attempt to revive their African past. At the beginning of bi-weekly town meetings and other formal events, in an attempt to enact the social, religious and political life of Yoruba ancestors, [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji revivalists have attempted to recreate their understanding of Yoruba cultural practices by educating themselves about Yoruba history and cultural practices. This has ranged from pursuing ritual apprenticeships, learning the divinatory corpus, attending workshops about Yoruba cultural practices and reading and studying texts about the history of African peoples. Most of the texts that document Yoruba "traditional" practices and are used in [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji today were published prior to 1955. These include various early 20th century Yoruba revivalist classics such as Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yoruba and N.A. Fadipe's The Sociology of the Yoruba. These texts form the source of knowledge for African American ancestral history and despite the apparent stability of these written historical forms, Yoruba revivalists participate in shaping norms of acceptability by basing their terms of practice on renditions of those accounts.Despite the attempts of various leaders within the community to focus on historical customs and "traditions" documented in Yoruba history texts, the friends and relatives of the deceased who lived in [Symbol Not Transcribed]Oy[Symbol Not Transcribed]otunji mourned the loss of their compatriot. Disappointed in the traditionalist prohibitions against suicide, they disputed the actual relevance of applying Yoruba funeral rites in present day circumstances. …