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  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin
  • Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 69 (2007/08)
  • Article

In this Issue

Analysing Africa

  • Ibadan 1960 - Martin Banham
  • The LUCAS Schools' Global Citizenship Project - Jane Plastow
  • Supernumeraries of the Human Race? Reflections on the African 'holocaust' - Morris Szeftel

Reading Africa

  • Review of African Theatre and Performances - Martin Banham
  • Review of Ngoma: Approaches to Arts Education in Southern Africa - Martin Banham
  • Review of Various titles from Bayreuth African Studies - Martin Banham
  • Review of Black Star / The African Slave Trade - Martin Banham
  • Review of Ngugi wa Thiong’o Speaks: Interviews with the Kenyan Writer - Martin Banham
  • Review of State of Violence: Politics, Youth and Memory in Contemporary Africa - Michael Etherton
  • Review of African Theatre: Youth - Tim Prentki
  • Review of Aawambo Kingdoms: History and Cultural Change - Will Jackson
  • Review of Public and Private Universities in Kenya / Gender in the Making of the Nigerian University System / Change and Transformation in Ghana's Publicly Funded University - James Gibbs
  • Review of Beautiful Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics - Will Rea
  • Review of Far in the Waste Sudan: On Assignment in Africa - Michael Medley
  • Review of Democratic Reform in Africa: Its Impact on Governance and Poverty Alleviation - Michael Medley
  • Review of Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century - Ineke van Kessel
  • Review of Globalisation and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness - Dr. Olasunkanmi Sholarin
  • Review of Writing Madness: Borderlines of the body in African literature - Jane Plastow
  • Review of Journey of Song: Public Life and Morality in Cameroon - Bill Jong-Ebot

Leeds African Studies Bulletin No. 69 (2007/08) Friday 29 June 2007

Review of Globalisation and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness

By Dr. Olasunkanmi Sholarin (University of Westminster)

Abstract

 

  • Article keywords:
  • Deborah A. Thomas
  • globalisation
  • Kamari Maxine Clarke
  • Olasunkanmi Sholarin

Globalisation and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, eds. Duke University Press, 2006. Pp .407. ISBN 0-8223-3772-X (pb). £14.95

This book belongs to the first series of academic materials that project the social and cultural values of people of African descent in the international arena. The authors fearlessly investigate how these virtues are being used to redefine the perception of blackness in the minds of others within the global village. The book towers above others in its category in the sense that it draws on the anthropology and rich cultural identity of Black People to express their social and cultural heritage.

The authors, in a constructively argued manner, query the low level of significance currently being attached to macroanalytics of racialization . This is in spite of the fact that it is a widely held notion that racial formations dynamically reflect and shape global processes, and not merely effect them. In a way, this book has succeeded in arguing the case that race has both constituted and been constituted by global transformations.Relying on the unique attributes of their music, dance and fashion, the people of African descent are ferociously questioning the global perception of blackness, while at the same time reshaping such global perceptions. This book explores the deep-rooted desire of many Africans in the diaspora not to be alienated from, but rather openly expressing their affinity to, their ancestral homeland and continent.

The authors must be commended for their blunt refusal not to be mindless about the vices that punctuate the virtues which, again, globalization has bestowed on the Africans in the diaspora. They discuss these vices with no less tenacity.

Through this book, I have come to realize the changing meanings and politics of blackness, and how the contemporary processes of globalization are both changing and being shaped by these changes. As a reader you are bound to realize the same.

[Published in Leeds African Studies Bulletin 69 (2007), p. 75]

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