"The Bodies of Black Judah: Emigrationism, Afrocentrism, and
the Public Sphere."
This talk recounts and analyzes an emigration story linked to
a group of African Americans (the African Hebrews of Jerusalem)
that left the United States for Africa in the late 1960s. Their
journey was predicated on a particular version of Afrocentric
philosophy/sensibility, a mixture of Marcus Garvey-esque calls
for an African-centered politics along with conceptual/ intellectual
claims about an ontological African alterity, the same intellectual
claims that were just beginning to get codified in the American
academy (as the philosophy of Afrocentricity) when these African
Americans left for Liberia and then Israel. I argue that these
“Black Hebrews” represent a kind of Hebraicization of Afrocentrism,
and I argue that their conceptions
/deployments of “the body” and its potential capacities (such as eternal life here on earth)
help to explain their purposefully omission from broader discussions.
This topic will be presented on Friday, April 17th at 10:15 a.m. as part of the Panel I discussion “Race, Otherness and the Body”
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July 2005.
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“Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America,” University of Chicago Press, 2001. (Paperback release, June 2003).
“Undoing Harlemworld: An Anthropological Argument about Diasporic Disasters,” Revolutions of the Mind: Cultural Studies in the African Diaspora Project, 1996-2002, CAAS Publications, 2003.
“Towards an Ethnography of a Quotation-Marked-Off Place,” “Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society,” Westview Press, Spring 1999. (Reprinted in Manning Marable, ed., Souls: The New Black Renaissance, Paradigm Press, 2006.)
“Ethnophysicality, or An Ethnography of Some Body,” “Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure,” edited by Richard Green and Monique Guillory, New York University Press, 1998.
Youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__HCVl81D2E
