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This presentation begins with the questions: What are t he working assumptions that determine a significant site of analysis or a p opular theoretical model? What intellectual products can come out of workin g under and within white supremacist\, unequal power structures? Focusing s pecifically on the emergence of social anthropology during the interwar per iod\, I discuss the ways that Europe’s fear of imperial decline led to a fr enzied effort towards colonial development\, with Africa as a key site of “ empire strengthening” and white racial consolidation. The rhetoric of colon ial 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 Eur opean colonial rule as a civilizing “trusteeship.” While the presentation f rames the political and economic context of the rise of social anthropology through the colonial process\, it is ultimately about the enduring theoret ical consequences of this colonial confrontation.
Jemima Pi erre (Ph.D.) is Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. She is also a Research Associate a t the inaugural Center for the Study of Race\, Gender and Class at the Univ ersity of Johannesburg. Her research and teaching interests are located in the overlaps between African Studies and African Diaspora Studies and engag e three broad areas: 1) race and political economy\; 2) transnationalism an d diaspora and\; 3) the cultural politics of knowledge production. She is t he author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Polit ics of Race (Chicago). Her next book\, Of Natives\, Ethnics\, and True Negr oes: A Counter-History of Anthropology\, is forthcoming with Duke Universit y Press. She is also continuing work on her manuscript\, “Haiti: The Second Occupation.” Dr. Pierre’s essays on global racial formation\, Ghana\, Hai tian 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\, Poli tique Africaine\, Black Scholar\, Sapiens\, and Boom California.
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