Introduction to Special Issue: Seeing Obama's Election through the Black Americas: Ethnographic Perspectives as a Mirror

Abstract

Based on fieldwork in Argentina, Ecuador, Jamaica, and Martinique during the 2008 campaign and the 2009 inauguration, extended to the 2012 election cycle, these articles build on anthropological scholarship on Diaspora. Local communities’ responses to the election and inauguration provide a look “behind the mirror” (Gregory 2007). Specifically, building on insights from Kamari Maxine Clarke (2010), this transnational connection imagined and called into being networks of black linkages, what she has called “humanitarian diasporas.” The discussions, analyses, and political claims‐making are examples of Gilroy's (1987; 1993) articulation of the Black Atlantic, particularly networks that transnationally or “outer‐nationally” link black communities to one another. Taking ethnographic subjects’ own transnational reflection of the meanings of Obama as a starting point, these articles analyze and extend our understandings of diaspora while offering a solid understanding of the many ways blackness is being defined and redefined in particular national and regional contexts.