Transforming Anthro

Our latest issue on the “Archives of Black Anthropology” is now available online! We are thrilled to share this special issue and to invite our readers to engage in dialogue with our intellectual ancestors and meditate on an archive that crosses borders, languages, and histories.

If the shortened link doesn't work, you can use this one: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

Join us this Women’s History Month on March 23 (12-1 pm ET) for a lunch and learn honoring and engaging with the archives and scholarship of Black feminist anthropologists Zora Neale Hurston and Eslanda Goode Robeson! Register here: bit.ly/TABFAMarch23

Drawing on their respective articles in our current issue, Nala K. Williams and Pyar Seth will be exploring archival research as well as Zora Neale Hurston and Eslanda Goode Robeson’s methodologies, including their forms of “feather-bed resistance” and critical fabulation.

Marlene Cunha is widely recognized as one of the godmothers of Black anthropology in Brazil. We encourage you to read about her life and cite her work! You can start by reading a chapter of her thesis and a commentary by her son, João Alípio Cunha, via the link in our bio!

In our current issue, we uplift and celebrate the legacy and scholarship of Marlene Cunha, a pathfinding Black Brazilian anthropologist and activist whose work has often been under-recognized in the Brazilian academy and in anglophone North American anthropology.

We are honored to publish a chapter from Marlene's thesis and to have a commentary from João in our current issue. Following João, we hope to make Marlene's activism and intellectual contributions visible to Brazilian society and to the larger anglophone anthropological academy.

In 2016, after entering the social anthropology graduate program at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, João began to visit Marlene’s closet and write articles about her life and work. In 2022, João published Marlene Cunha’s master’s thesis as a book.

Only a few days after João Alípio Cunha’s birth, his mother, the pathfinding Black Brazilian anthropologist and activist Marlene Cunha, passed away. Marlene Cunha’s archive was safeguarded by Marlene’s mother in a closet until João was ready to share his mother’s legacy.

The essay, translated for the first time into English by Christen A. Smith, was initially a chapter of Cunha’s master’s thesis, which was recently published for her posthumously as a book in 2022 by her son, João Alípio Cunha. Read the full essay here: buff.ly/GIo2x5g

In “The Terreiro as an Ethnic Expression,” Black Brazilian anthropologist and activist Marlene Cunha examines the history and culture of African-Brazilian religious houses (also called terreiros do candomblé) in Brazil’s modern urban cities.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past fundamentally rewired how I analyze historical narratives. The reminder that power shapes not just the story, but the archive itself, is indispensable.

You can read Trouillot's previously unpublished manuscript and commentaries on this essay from Alyssa Paredes and Alyssa A.L James by visiting the link in our bio!

Our special issue honors Black intellectual elders whose work has shaped the field. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012) was an anthropologist and historian that spent his life committed to the study of the Caribbean and its place in modernity.

Read the full article here! journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/73…

Our current issue contains a brilliant reflection by Alyssa A.L James on Trouillot's line about the "strange sweetness about commodities." For James, the estranged commodity is not just historically produced but affectively and spatially "remade, negotiated, and contested."

Read the full essay here: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/73…

Happy Sunday! Don't miss this thoughtful commentary by Alyssa Paredes, where she reflects on the divergent visions of an "anthropology of commodities" from Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Arjun Appadurai.

As Dr. Bolles joins the ancestors, we are grateful that her legacy and rich archive will remain for generations to come. 🤍

Elsewhere, her writings on citation and erasure have profoundly shaped our discipline and generations of Black feminist anthropologists. Dr. Bolles was an intellectual giant, a generous mentor, a dear friend, and her passing is a great loss to the TA and ABA community.

The team at Transforming Anthropology is devastated to learn of the passing of A. Lynn Bolles. Dr. Bolles was a groundbreaking anthropologist and Professor Emerita in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland.