Biography
Personal Biography
Professional Biography
Personal Biography
Kamari Clarke (formerly Maxine Claudia Clarke) was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica and moved with her family to Canada when she was a baby. Raised in Toronto of immigrant parents, an engineer and a banker, she hails from a line of Jewish traders on her maternal side of the family who traveled from Palestine to the Caribbean to trade diamonds. Her paternal side of the family has not been clearly documented but it was understood that they were formerly enslaved during plantation slavery in Jamaica and eventually bought their freedom and became agricultural landowners.
Kamari came of age in the 1970s in contexts that made her deeply aware of the complexities of power and the privilege of education and social status. Her insights into both sides of power and social mobility at a young age made her particularly sensitive the workings of power. Her life’s work was always that of social analysis and political engagement. During her elementary and high school years at McMurrich Junior Public School, D. B. Hood Elementary School, Fairbank Middle School and then Oakwood Collegiate Institute (high school) in Toronto, she was fully engaged in student activities from winning public speaking competitions, Ontario Youth Awards, to representing Ontario and Canada in National sports tournaments, to co-founding the first black (Afro-Canadian) club in a Toronto high school in 1983.
During her student years at Concordia University, she played a leadership role in the university’s anti-apartheid position and worked with students at McGill University to mobilize support for South Africa’s disenfranchised. The power of the international movement of sanctions against South Africa owes its success to nodes of social organizing in global cities and micro-movements such as her anti-apartheid activism in Montreal in the mid-1980s.
After this period, Clarke took the African name, “Kamari” as a rejection of the ongoing structural conditions that led people of African descent to adopt names that reflected those of the owners of plantations during conditions of slavery.
She graduated from Concordia University in Political Science-International Relations in 1988 and at the graduation ceremony, upon receiving the prestigious Concordia University Council on Student Life Award, she announced her new name with a short speech to an audience of approximately five hundred people. The speech explained that studying at the university taught her not only about the theories and histories of a world in motion and Canada’s place in it, but also about the histories of inequality that impacted the life and identities of Black people in the Americas. “These conditions,” she explained, “continued to shape structural inequality in our world and for this reason taking “Kamari” as my new name will remind me of a history denied that can be reclaimed in other ways.”
Shortly thereafter, Kamari moved to the United States to pursue a Masters of Arts in Political Anthropology at the New School for Social Research – which she finished in 1993. Upon completing her masters, she earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz under the guidance of – Carolyn Martin Shaw, Steve Caton, Lisa Rofel, Don Brenneis and Angela Davis. After her doctorate she then completed a Master in the Study of Law in 2003 at Yale Law School.
Upon completing her Ph.D. in 1997, Clarke took up an appointment as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of Anthropology and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she spent two years. In 1998 she was offered a teaching position as an assistant professor at Yale University and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut in 1999. In 2003 she was promoted to Associate Professor and then was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2007/8, and then to full professor in 2009 where she remained until 2013. At Yale, addition to serving as Yale’s chairperson for the Council on African studies from 2009-2012 and co-founding Yale’s Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis. In 2009, she became the first Black female professor on faculty in the social sciences tenured in Yale University’s 300+ year history.
From 2013-2015 Clarke taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the Anthropology Department, from 2015-2018 at Carleton University in Canada, from 2018-2021 at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Clarke is currently a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto.
Professional Biography
Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto and an Adjunct Professor at the University of California Los Angeles. For more than twenty years, she has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of race and globalization. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions concerning culture and power and detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key academic contributions has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. In addition to her scholarly work, she has served as a technical advisor to the African Union (AU) legal counsel and produced policy reports to help the AU navigate various international law and United Nations challenges. Clarke has published nine books (3 monographs and 6 edited volumes) with over 50 peer-refereed journal articles and book chapters. She is the author of Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (2019, Duke), Fictions of Justice (Cambridge, 2010), and Mapping Yorùbá Networks (Duke, 2004). Clarke is the recipient of the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize, as well as the 2019 finalist for the Elliot Skinner book award for her latest book, Affective Justice (Duke, 2019). She is also a recipient of a Distinguished Chair in Transnational Justice sand Socio-legal Studies and the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence.
Past Research and Scholarship
Over the past twenty years, Professor Clarke has undertaken three related research projects. Having turned to anthropology after completing her first degree in political science, she was interested in developing analytic tools for studying the complex forces of change that were transforming Africa and the African diaspora following the end of the Cold War. Her early research helped to develop the field of globalization and transnationalism of the black Atlantic world. She began her career as a graduate student in the early 1990s in political anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Over the past twenty years, her research, publications and teaching have built on her earlier passions, spanning a range of new anthropological domains—from emergent transnational religious movements, to inquiries into the politics of justice in international law movements, to her current project related to new digital technologies and their use in dealing with various evidentiary challenges in legal circles.
Throughout her career, she has been interested in understanding how interrelationships among state actors, lawyers, religious leaders, and scientific and religious practitioners negotiate culture and power in the contemporary period. Such a focus has been central to her intellectual commitments and to the development of a new and growing area in political, legal and transnational anthropology. As a leader in this area of theory building she has achieved recognition as a central interlocutor in interpreting transnational legal processes and their related socio-cultural and political contestations.
Clarke’s research has also attracted support from several major funding bodies, including The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (1995-96 and 2009-2011; 2015-16; 2017-2019), The Open Society Foundation (2014-2019), The National Science Foundation (NSF) (2012-2015, 2020-23), The Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) (1994-97, 2020-2023) and the U. S. State Department (2021 – 2023).
Over the years she has published in a range of journals in the field — The Annual Review of Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Religion and Society, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), and Anthropologica: The Journal of the Canadian Anthropology Society. One of her more widely read pieces was published in a flagship journal of my field—Current Anthropology. Titled “Toward a Critically Engaged Ethnographic Practice” (2010), the article explores the scholarly benefits of engaged anthropological work. Also popular has been her article in Transforming Anthropology, entitled “New Spheres of Transnational Formations: Mobilizations of Humanitarian Diasporas” (2010), which attempts to map the changing articulations of diasporic and transnational scholarship as it relates to various institutional and humanitarian projects.
In the law and human rights fields, she has published in key journals including Law, Text, Culture; The International Journal of Human Rights; African Journal of Legal Studies; Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, and The Loyola of Los Angeles International and Comparative Law Review. She has also contributed to important area studies journals such as Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Her contributions to scholarly publishing of chapters in edited volumes, book reviews, reports, working papers, and policy documents further reflect the development of her thinking and collaborative efforts over the past two decades.
Over the past twenty years, she has undertaken three related research projects that have resulted in three individually published monographs, as well as six edited collections, with the final edited book being The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society, a major reader in the study of Law, Culture and Power. Her first single-authored book publication, Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities (Duke University Press, 2004), developed out of her doctoral research, explores particular forms of transnational religious practices that have produced certain cultural regulations. Since its publication, many reviews have highlighted the book’s innovation in regard to multi-sited work in black diasporic spaces.
Published after more than a decade of research on globalization, her second book explored the emergent international rule of law movement and its challenges around legal pluralism. Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009) analyzes the competing religious and ethnic politics of justice-making in local and transnational contexts. Using examples from UN preparatory commissions for the International Criminal Court (ICC), NGOs engaged in ICC organizing, and controversies over the legal classification and management of violence, she examines the ways that legal experts, religious conservatives, humanitarian organizations, and human rights organizations struggled to apply a universal United Nations-sanctioned approach to rights, especially in light of related engagements with political Islamic formations in West Africa. With this publication she mapped a new terrain in the cultural study of the international rule of law movement. The scholarly discussions that emerged from these publications contributed to heated debates over the politics of international tribunals, establishing her as an early voice in shaping a new field of inquiry, the anthropology of international justice.
Building on these critical interventions and with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) (2011-2014) her research launched a new phase in the study of the international rule of law movement involving the ICC, the African Court, and the African Union (UN). Resulting in Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (Duke, 2019), this work explored the role of affects and emotions at the interplay of international law and politics. She argued that justice, expressed through liberal legality, needs affectivities in order to establish legitimacy in particular contexts. Affects emerge as both physical and psychological responses and expressions—visible as “feeling rules or norms”—that are embedded in particular socio-historical and biopolitial regimes. She argued that understanding these norms is critical to grasping how international justice is being debated and envisioned in the contemporary period.
Though much of Clarke’s research has sought to make a contribution to multi-sited, diasporic, and transnational theorizing, it has raised challenging methodological dilemmas about the limits of contemporary ethnography in a complex world. The development of expertise in multiple world regions often requires a tremendous amount of work, time and resources. This recognition of the changing nature of the field has led her to become equally committed to collaborative research.