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.