the young people's professor

Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool
By Jacqueline Nassy Brown
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Frank Leon Roberts
New York University

Jacqueline Nassy Brown’s Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool is a nuanced and sophisticated exploration of the ways in which racial knowledge is embedded in discourses of place and locality in the British port-city of Liverpool. A lively and timely contribution to critical race theory, African diaspora studies, and the anthropology of globalization, Brown’s text offers an important union of the largely separate literatures on race and place.

My aims here are two-fold. First, for the sake of clarity I want to provide a brief explication of each of the nine chapters which make up Dropping Anchor, then move to a more detailed discussion of the texts’ primary conceptual and theoretical interventions.

Let us begin by quickly “mapping” the book. Brown’s introductory chapter, “Setting Sail” references the key theoretical and conceptual paradigms from which she both draws and contributes. Citing the work of U.S. anthropologists who have focused on issues of “place” in the construction of racial epistemologies (specifically John Hartigan and Steven Gregory), as well as the writings of British geographer Doreen Massey, Brown suggests that her primary aim will be to demonstrate how “British cultural notions of place and localness have shaped all aspects of racial politics in Liverpool” (4).

Chapter two then focuses on the role that African American expressive and political cultures have played in the constitution of Liverpuldian understandings of race. Specifically, Brown anchors her discussion around two formative moments of African American/Black British contact: African American male G.I.’s in Liverpool during World War II and the traveling cultures of African American music and Afro-centric politics during the U.S. Civil Rights movement. Brown argues that these two historical events played an important, if not foundational, role in the making of Black Liverpool, particularly in regards to gender relations.

Chapter three, inspired in part by Stuart Hall’s classic Policing the Crisis, focuses on the impact of the Notting Hill “Riots” of 1981 on framing how contemporary discourses of race and “Britishness” get mediated through contestations of place. Brown provides a genealogy of how race and place came to be figured alongside each other in Liverpool and in Britain more generally. Similarly, chapter four “Genealogies: Place, Race, and Kinship” (the weakest of the book) provides a brief trajectory of how, beginning in the late 1970s, the notion of locality figured into calls for a politicized and specifically Liverpool-born Black identity (LBBs).

Chapter five, “Diaspora and its Discontents” analyses the contradictory racial positionings Blacks in Liverpool occupy vis-à-vis each other. By focusing on the intra-racial politics of Liverpool-born Blacks, Afro-Caribbeans and ex-colonial West Africans, Brown argues that diaspora need not be solely theorized as a condition characterized by displacement and/or migration, but potentially as a mode of relationality sometimes anchored in the local rather than the global.

Chapters six and seven rely more heavily of textual and literary analysis then what is customary for most ethnographies. Here Brown is interested in demonstrating how constructions of whiteness get narrativized in the history of “Black Liverpool.” Brown shows how Liverpool’s “postcolonial displacement” further instantiated “place not only as the producer of identity but as identity” (131). Specifically, chapter six explores four white working class male autobiographies and chapter seven looks at contemporary responses by black and white informants to the history of Liverpudlian slave narratives. The ninth chapter “Local Women and Global Men: The Liverpool That Was” focuses on Black Liverpudlian’s appeals to cosmopolitanism as further negotiated attempts to transcend the boundaries of race and nation. Finally, in the book’s epilogue “Leaving Liverpool” Brown gestures toward the implications of her study for further research on thinking through place, race, and locality more broadly.

• Dropping Anchor’s Interventions

And indeed Brown’s contributions are broad and expansive. Overall, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail makes three primary interventions. First, Brown’s text provides an important and much needed ethnographic contribution to critical race theory by formulating place as a specific apparatus of racial formation. While the idea that “race” is experienced and/or “constructed” variously according to different geographies is certainly not a new concept for race theory (indeed, this tenet is somewhat axiomatic in cultural studies) few works have thought seriously about how racial knowledge gets embedded—or actually replaced—by notions of place.

Indeed, what is brilliant here about Brown’s text is that it does not succumb to the common error of naturalizing race as the necessary imperative. Brown resists the clumsy argument that race is simply experienced differently in specific locations and “cultural contexts”—instead suggesting that it is locality itself that sets the terms for how identities are constituted in Britain. Thus, Brown demonstrates how in Black Liverpool it is place, not race, that is the primary organizing concept for how people understand their sense of “Britishness” (including their exclusions from such imagined communities).

Secondly, Brown’s text contributes to a growing body of literature both in and outside of anthropology that has troubled some of the basic assumptions of how “diaspora” is conceptualized within diaspora studies. As a concept, diaspora has most often been theorized within one of two paradigms: diaspora as a condition and diaspora as a practice. The first approach, diaspora as a condition, has long been the paradigm par excellence for Jewish, South Asian and African diaspora studies, championed by the likes of Daniel Boyarin, James Clifford, David Scott and Arjun Appadurai, among countless others. This “condition” model has framed diaspora as a circumstance based on voluntary or forced migrations: dispersal, exile, rupture. This is the ‘push factor’ approach to diaspora.

The second, more recent approach---exemplified in the work of Paul Gilroy and Brent Edwards— has opened up diaspora as an adjective more nearly than a noun. This critical formulation has emphasized the “doing” of diaspora more so than the “being”—diaspora is something one does rather than what one is or lives in.

Brown’s ethnographic work points her in a new direction: diaspora as a mode of relationality. Focusing on how conflicts between Liverpool-born blacks, West Africans and Afro-Caribbean are staged in the localized context of Liverpool, Brown argues that approaching diaspora as a system of relations puts pressure on older, romantic models. Thinking through diaspora as a mode of relationality moves us away from the popular “rupture” model which focuses exclusively on displacements from “authentic” homelands. Instead, approaching diaspora from the perspective of relationality allows us to think through how various agents negotiate locality itself as the contested site for “making home”. Thus, Brown argues that the various black communities in Liverpool experience “diaspora” by and through the fundamental question of, “Who are we in relation to each other?” (100).

Finally, and perhaps most convincingly, Brown’s text provides a stinging feminist critique of how locality is typically conceptualized within the anthropology of globalization and in globalization discourses more generally. Brown argues for (and indeed offers) a more nuanced theorization of locality that does not render it as simply the “theater where global dramas are worked out” (133). Rather, she posits locality as a discursive artifact which maps the social spatially. Thus, “the local” is neither divorced from the “largeness” of the global nor is it merely the “cultural context” for thinking through how global processes operate “on the ground.” Instead, the local is “the outcome of power”, “can be any size and…articulate with any other spatial or social categories” (ibid). Ultimately Brown argues that “the local” is itself a discursive construct which provides the very conditions upon which the notion of “cultural context” depends.

There are problems with this study however. For one, Brown tends to interpret “blackness” in a particularly Americanist frame, reducing the category to people of African descent. Thus for Brown “blackness” equals Africans, Caribbeans, and Liverpool-born blacks. What is missing from this approach is a rigorous consideration of how blackness as a social category in Britain has been anchored less in biological-racial determinism (i.e. “people of African descent”) and more in political affiliation. Thus South Asians have long been “read” as “black” in Britain, regardless of whether or not they are understood to be “people of African descent.” Brown makes an obligatory acknowledgement of this fact, yet chooses to reify blackness in Americanist terms. Secondly, her project is somewhat imbalanced with its emphasis on U.S. ethnographies alongside British theories. Indeed, the two ethnographies Brown cites most frequently to build her argument about the politics of place in Britain are Hartigan’s Racial Situations (based on fieldwork in Detroit) and Corona’s Black Corona (based on fieldwork in New York) while theoretically she draws primarily from black British culturalists such as Paul Gilroy. Thus we get very little sense of previous ethnographic approaches to place in Britain in general or theoretical formulations of the black diaspora that have emerged outside of the context of black british cultural theory.

Nonetheless, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail represents an outstanding scholarly amalgamation of contemporary British anthropology, critical race theory, and transnational American Studies.

Posted by the young people's professor on 2/27/2007 at 3:25:00 AM | Permalink