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This presentation begins with the questions: What are the working assumptions that determine a significant site of analysis or a popular theoretical model? What intellectual products can come out of working under and within white supremacist, unequal power structures? Focusing specifically on the emergence of social anthropology during the interwar period, I discuss the ways that Europe’s fear of imperial decline led to a frenzied effort towards colonial development, with Africa as a key site of “empire strengthening” and white racial consolidation. The rhetoric of colonial development depended both on the intellectual mapping of Africa and the attendant paternalism hidden in the language of African (“native”) welfare and protection. These processes were structured in and through an ironic “anti-racist” discourse that condemned the racism of Nazism while accepting the international hierarchical racial and imperial order that justified European colonial rule as a civilizing “trusteeship.” While the presentation frames the political and economic context of the rise of social anthropology through the colonial process, it is ultimately about the enduring theoretical consequences of this colonial confrontation.
Jemima Pierre (Ph.D.) is Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. She is also a Research Associate at the inaugural Center for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg. Her research and teaching interests are located in the overlaps between African Studies and African Diaspora Studies and engage three broad areas: 1) race and political economy; 2) transnationalism and diaspora and; 3) the cultural politics of knowledge production. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race (Chicago). Her next book, Of Natives, Ethnics, and True Negroes: A Counter-History of Anthropology, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. She is also continuing work on her manuscript, “Haiti: The Second Occupation.” Dr. Pierre’s essays on global racial formation, Ghana, Haitian studies, immigration, and African diaspora theory and politics have appeared in several academic journals including, Transforming Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, Anthurium, Journal of Anthropological Sciences, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Review, Social Text, Identities, Cultural Dynamics, Current Anthropology, Journal of Haitian Studies, Latin American Perspective, Philosophia Africana, Politique Africaine, Black Scholar, Sapiens, and Boom California.
