Stigma and Culture ─ Last-Place Anxiety in Black America

Stigma and Culture by J. Lorand Matory is a courageous auto-ethnographic examination of the stigma attached to color. The work is a major contribution to a new scholarly genre, a form of anthropological theory-building in memoir form. Its varied gestures include: paeans to past mentors; rich recollections of childhood; ethnographic analyses of various cultural institutions, especially Howard University; re-conceptualizations of Caribbean/African significances vis-a-vis African Americans in the United States, and more. Such a wide-ranging effort is precisely what recommends this bookand what makes it like few other books in Anthropology or Africana Studies. Matory argues that several ironies highlight class-based (seemingly post-racial) social formations while also reinforcing racialization and challenging such racial logics from within. He shows how educational institutions are spaces for the paradoxical production of both elitist/post-ethnic class identities and for the fostering of would-be ethnic particularity and differenceall at the same time. Providing a nuanced window into variously situated Black” groups in the United States (including the seemingly exotic little races” or tri-racial isolates” such as Louisiana Creoles and the oft-discussed Gullah/Geechee), this book argues that the longstanding scholarly assumption about social isolation as a causal mechanism for the cultural legitimacy of such groups is absolutely wrong. Instead, Matory shows that all of these groups are quite decidedly produced in and through contact with their ostensible others. Ethnic purities and particularities are the byproducts of anxieties and efforts birthed from the contact that such purities are meant to deny. This is one of the book’s most powerful interventions, and Matory provides compelling arguments for how so many get this wrong. Ultimately Stigma and Culture explains not just the continuing significance of race and ethnicity as seen in various American contexts, but also makes the case for how new and old ethnic differences are enabled and produced in the contemporary moment.

J. Lorand Matory is the Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and director of the Center for African and American Research at Duke University. He is the author of two award-winning books,Sex and the Empire That Is No More and Black Atlantic Religion.