Jemima Pierre
Postdoctoral Fellow, 2002-2003

Jemima Pierre is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She received her doctorate in the African Diaspora Program in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Her research ethnographically explores processes of racialization in Africa and its diaspora by comparing and contrasting ideologies and practices of “race” in Ghana and for African immigrants in Washington, D.C. She further addresses both anthropological and diaspora theory and methodology as sites of inquiry that simultaneously mask and unmask the institutions and ideologies of “race” in the contemporary era. She has been the recipient of fellowships from, among others, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies (University of Virginia), the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the National Science Foundation, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. Dr. Pierre was born in Gros Morne, Haiti and raised in Miami, Florida.

Fellow's Project Description
Race Across the Atlantic: Mapping Racialization in Africa and the African Diaspora

My project is a multi-sited exploration of the dynamics and politics of racialization. Based on fifteen months of comparative field research in Accra, Ghana and Washington, D.C., the study explores how racialization works to create global “Black” identities and the ways these identities are deployed and understood in a transnational context. I begin with the premise that racialization is global and hegemonic and, as such, its processes significantly link Africa to its diaspora. The project shows that racialization occurs in Accra, Ghana in ways that are both similar to and distinct from its occurrence in urban United States. In this comparative examination of racial formation in West Africa and in North America, I focus on three general sites: 1) the racial legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism; 2) the re-articulation of racial hierarchies in this neo-colonial moment; and 3) the mutual configuration of identities and relationships effected by continued dynamic interactions between Africa and the African diaspora.

The project challenges the general, commonsense intellectual assumption that societies in Africa do not actively participate in the contemporary global discourses and practices of “race” and racialization. It engages three sets of theoretical and epistemological trends. Within African studies, the recent (post)colonial framework through which many African societies are conceptualized often does not account for the continued existence of racially structured unequal (national and global) relationships and practices. African diaspora studies, however, clearly recognizes that the social and political constructs of “race” significantly inform various forms of identification in “Black” communities. Nevertheless, there is a continued reluctance, within diaspora theorization, to directly engage Africa in its contemporary complexity, especially as a site of racialized identity formation. Such predicaments (within African and African diaspora studies) are, I believe, structured by the overall reluctance to understand racial formation as a global phenomenon. My project, on the other hand, foregrounds the practices of “race” and racialization that, South Africa aside, have received less attention in historiographic and ethnographic studies of Africa. By so doing, the study shows the potential for a global theory of racial formation that has broad implications, in this age of extensive global interaction, for the discourse, practice, and understanding of “race.”