Area of Interest:

Globalization and Place, Social Movements, Constructions of Race and History, Critical Development Studies, Gender, Public Anthropology, Caribbean, U.S. Southwest

Education:

Ph.D., University of Florida 1996.

Research & Activities:

Present Research: Trained in political economy, my current broad interests concern globalization processes and the ways that they shape and are shaped by configurations of place (especially in rural contexts), constructions and meanings of race, and social movements.  For over ten years I have worked in the Eastern Caribbean exploring how rural producers, individually and collectively, intersect with discourses on global free trade through their own alternative narratives on place and nation.  Issues of gender, culture, and class are important to these narratives as well. 

More recently, I have been involved in a project examining what are known as the historic "all black towns" of Oklahoma, born of a movement for black solidarity in the late 19th century.  I am interested in the ways that race and history are mobilized, in contested ways and by diverse actors, to define the towns today as they are situated within multi-racial/ethnic social and economic processes such as global heritage tourism, the prison industrial complex, and transnational Latino migration into Oklahoma.

With Deborah Thomas (University of Pennsylvania), I am also pursuing a collaborative project that engages the current Area Studies vs. Global Studies debates by considering trajectories of Caribbeanist research since the early 20th century. Organizing a variety of sustained discussions over more than three years (among U.S. and non-U.S. Caribbeanists; among anthropologists and non-anthropologists) , we have attempted to flesh out the diverse forms of politics that contextualize Caribbeanist research; the ways that methodological and theoretical trends within anthropology are mutually constitutive of Caribbeanist anthropologies more specifically; and the interdisciplinary and transnational dimensions and possibilities of Caribbean studies.

Courses Taught:
I currently hold a joint appointment in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies (www.unc.edu/depts/afriafam/).  Courses I have taught in both departments include:

Anthropology of the Caribbean
Globalization and Resistance

Contemporary African American Issues
Afro-Caribbeans and the U.S.
Writing and Publishing in Anthropology

Public Anthropology 
Black Feminist Theory

Selected Publications:

2007  Caribbeanist Anthropologies at the Crossroads:  Revisiting Themes, Revising Concepts.  Special journal issue co-edited wth Deborah Thomas.  Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture.  vol .14. no. 1/2.

2007  "Situating Sugar Strikes: Contestations of Race and Politics in Decolonizing St. Lucia."  Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture 14 (1/2):  39-62.

2006  Free Trade and Freedom:  Neoliberalism, Place, and Nation in the Caribbean.  University of Michigan Press.

2005  "Globalisation, the Nation, and Labour Struggles in St. Lucia's Banana Industry."  In: Revisiting Caribbean Labour Studies:  Essays in Honour of O. Nigel Bolland.  Constance Sutton, editor, pp. 98-117.  Ian Randle Publishers.

2003 (with Deborah Thomas) "Rethinking Global and Area Studies: Insights from the Caribbean." American Anthropologist (105)3:  553-565.

2003 "Discourses and Counter Discourses on Globalization and the St. Lucian Banana Industry." In: Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History. Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg, editors, pp.306-357.  Duke University Press.

2001 "Negotiating Identity and Black Feminist Politics in Caribbean Research." In: Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Praxis, Poetics, and Politics. Irma McClaurin, editor, pp. 126-149. Rutgers University Press.