Jemima Pierre

Professor, Department of African American Studies and Department of Anthropology

Jemima Pierre is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research and teaching interests are located in the overlaps between African Studies and African Diaspora Studies and engage three broad areas: race, racial formation theory, and political economy; culture and the history of anthropological theory; and transnationalism, globalization, and diaspora. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. She is currently completing a manuscript whose working title is “Racial Americanization: Conceptualizing African Immigrants in the U.S.,” and working on a project on the racialized political economy of multinational resource extraction in Ghana. Dr. Pierre’s essays on global racial formation, Ghana, immigration, and African diaspora theory and politics have appeared in a number of academic journals including, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Review, Social Text, Identities, Cultural Dynamics, Transforming Anthropology, Journal of Haitian Studies, Latin American Perspective, American Anthropologist, and Philosophia Africana.

Education

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin

Research Interests

  • Race/racial formation
  • Race and political economy
  • Cultural politics of decolonization in Africa
  • History and theory of anthropology
  • African diaspora studies and theory