Following a call for workers from the Caribbean to come to Britain to rebuild the metropolis after the Second World War, the Black community in London grew considerably. Despite being British subjects by birth in a British colony, Black Britons experienced racism, violence and harsh policing. By the mid-1960s, inspired by Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, activists established legal services to promote the civil rights of Black people and to address the limitations of state services – a “welfare state from below”. Crowd-funding techniques were used to organize 24-hour telephone lines to connect people with legal support and advice on arrest. This voluntary work influenced later campaigns to reform police practice from the 1970s: issues that are still alive in the twenty-first century.
The eder, Ethiopian funeral association, has commonly been seen as a voluntary, mutual-aid association well suited for various development activities. I argue that the eder is of a different order, based on its power to ostracize. The local community is criss-crossed by individually managed relations of reciprocity, while the eder brought new elements of collective action. In this article, I explore neighbourly relations in peasant communities.
Various uses have been made of Fernand Braudel's concept of the longue duree. But the concept does not appear to have ever been used to explain how former African slave populations have become ghettoized. In this paper, I propose to use the concept of the longue duree to make sense of the manner in which a former African slave population in the southwest region of Mauritius has become ghettoized. The most obvious benefit that comes from using the concept is the depth-in-time perspective it adds to studies of low-income housing areas in the region, which allows us to develop a better understanding of the various factors that have contributed to the ghettoization of this population. The other benefit that comes from using the concept of the longue duree is that in encouraging comparisons with different geographical areas, the concept can also help us to specify what is particular or unique to a region. As will become evident from this study, while there is compelling evidence of the increasing ghettoization of low-income housing areas in the southwest region of Mauritius, the paper underlines that the factors contributing to the ghettoization of former African slave populations both in Mauritius and other parts of the world need not be identical.
This article, based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival data, examines the limits of indigeneity and the role of the nation state in unintentionally fostering or discouraging identity formations of certain kinds. It focuses on Bhils, the largest 'tribal' group in South Asia with a population of around 17 million, to ask why they are seen as 'indigenous' in India though not in Pakistan. It shows how the colonial category of 'tribes' for the Bhils has been sustained and strengthened in postcolonial India due to institutional and bureaucratic practices, vernacular publications, upper-caste and transnational activism while a different set of actions by the state of Pakistan have resulted in absence of such 'regimes of discipline.' This divergent scenario is contrasted with a field view of the rural countryside by describing the complexity of self-identity and claims-making of the Bhils around the Narmada Valley, India and Tharparkar, Sindh province, Pakistan. The identity claims of the Bhils in both the countries, ranging from Kshatriya (upper-caste warriors) to Dalits (formerly 'untouchable' castes) show striking similarities, though also differ at times and is mostly at odds with the global indigeneity discourse and the administrative categories.
In 2018, a previously erased African American cemetery was dramatically rediscovered in Tampa, Florida. The rediscovery was accompanied by multiple acts of remembrance: archaeologists set about confirming the presence of coffins and bodies; people living on top or nearby this and other burial grounds began reporting a series of ghostly visions and visitations; and the city government and its contractors put forward plans to memorialize the erased cemetery. Based on participant-observation with city employees, developers, and activists undertaken as part of a broader project on the politics of race, empire, and urban life in South Florida, this article investigates the erasure and rediscovery of this and other historic cemeteries in order to inquire into the social and political life of indeterminacy at sites of necropolitical violence. While some residents attempted to enter into meaningful interpersonal relations with the spirits of actual deceased persons, taking their existence as a potentially transparent fact, agents of the state instead developed a position on the question of haunting more in line with social theories of the spectral as an impossible possibility. Attending to this fact ethnographically reveals the relationship between statecraft, the nonsecular, and the politics of indeterminacy in a new light.
