The Esu Review » Book Reviews

Ryan Cecil Jobson reviews John Jackson Jr’s book Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem

admin — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 21:35:20 +0000

It is telling that Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, a monograph that so blatantly defies ethnographic convention, opens on an airplane en route to the Holy Land. As John Jackson later details, the classical anthropological trope of the “arrival scene” is an authenticating gesture, but one that finds little purchase in social worlds that abound with digital media technologies and accompanying “field-sites…[that] come knocking at our doors or flitting across our computer screens” (2013:48). In lieu of an arrival, the reader is made privy to a departure in a number of respects. By situating us in the cabin of a jetliner, Jackson makes clear that he has departed from the comforts of place, and along with it the comforts of an ethnographic paradigm that confers upon the anthropologist a divine right to interpretation.

The full book review can be downloaded here -> Thin Description Review_Ryan Jobson

Petal Samuel reviews Tsitsi Jaji’ s book Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity

admin — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 19:15:57 +0000

Tsitsi Jaji’s elegant study opens with an anecdote at once personal and emblematic: her interlinked memories of celebrations of Zimbabwe’s independence and the broadcasting of Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” on the radio. By examining such instances of black diasporic music’s circulation in continental Africa, Africa in Stereo demonstrates the role of music as a site for exploring and enacting pan-African solidarity and the experience of being “modern” in Africa. A critical intervention into studies of the African diaspora, Jaji’s study joins a body of scholarship that troubles unidirectional conceptions of diaspora that occlude continental Africa from its ongoing currents of exchange. Indeed, Africa in Stereo draws from a wide range of sources—including film, poetry, hymnbooks, magazines, ads, and other media—in order to demonstrate the breadth and vibrancy of U.S. African American music’s diverse afterlives in African media.

The full review can be downloaded here -> Sounding Solidarity_Review of Africa in Stereo_Petal Samuel

Kaneesha Parsad reviews Salamishah Tillet’s book Sites of Slavery

admin — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 19:09:40 +0000

Salamishah Tillet’s Sites of Slavery examines the ways in which post-Civil Rights African American

writers and artists return “to the site of slavery” (Tillet 2) in order to grapple with the ongoing

exclusion of African Americans from full citizenship and to pose racial futures. Tillet analyzes

diverse texts, ranging from legal documents to plays and films. All share what she calls a “democratic

aesthetic,” the strategic use of postmodernist approaches and metafiction in particular to narrate or

visualize the paradox of African American citizenship. Further, Tillet argues that as part of a

democratic aesthetic these writers and artists deploy what she terms “critical patriotism,” an

orientation toward American citizenship born of “dissent, criticality, and inclusion”(12). Ultimately,

this posture enables them to move black women from the outskirts to the center of American citizen.

The full review can be downloaded here -> Sites of Slavery Review_Kaneesha Parsard