Michael Ralph
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 80865 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Michael Ralph |
| NOMBRES | Michael |
| APELLIDO | Ralph |
| FIRMA | RALPH M |
| AFILIACIONES | New York University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 121 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1969 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
The Problem of Liquidity
When the international slave trade to the United States was outlawed in 1808, planters sought to preserve their dwindling supply of enslaved workers by renting them out in large numbers, rather than selling them outright. This business strategy emerged from a deeper, more profound change in the prevailing calculus of investment, expertise, and monetary valuation. As enslaved workers acquired expertise in the emergent industries of the moment (inc…
Afterword
Slavery and incarceration in the frontier
This article uses original archival research to revise the scholarly consensus on convict leasing to demonstrate that it first emerges on US soil in Kentucky’s eighteenth century frontier society (rather than in the Deep South in the wake of the 13th amendment) and that it began in a prison filled with incarcerated white people (rather than as a way to keep African Americans trapped in a condition analogous to slavery). Convict leasing was born o…
Artist Statement
The front and back cover images of this issue are inspired by Fishing, a graphic book written by Michael Ralph and illustrated by Nia Palmer and Laura Molnar (forthcoming). Fishing is a term people who are incarcerated sometimes use to describe the practice of improvising strings (from bed sheets, clothing, dental floss, and other fabrics) they can tie to objects to share with each other. Fishing is a dynamic network of attachment and attentivene…
Conjunctures
The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps and air filters, shopping malls and circuses, ur…
Forensics
Deodande is when any man by misfortune is slaine by a horse or by a cart, or by anie other thinge that moveth, then this thing that is cause of his death, and which at the time of the misfortune mooved, shall be forfayte to the Queen ... —Deodand, as defined in a law dictionary (1579) THE ENGLISH medieval law of deodand stipulates that if an inanimate object kills a person, the owner of the “accursed” object must transfer it to God. In practical …
Higher
Racial capitalism
Editor's Introduction
Six / Forensics of Capital
Saint Tupac
Widespread fascination with Tupac Shakur's 2012 holographic resurrection at the Coachella music festival provides the occasion for theorizing human possibility in the context of Afro‐diasporic religions. In considering Tupac's life and legacy, we refer to the spiritual power of his resurrection as an apotheosis, or divine ascendency toward sainthood. However, instead of restricting our discussion to the familiar context of Catholic sainthood, we …
Style Guide for Authors
As the chief publication of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Transforming Anthropology advances scholarship across the four fields of anthropology and beyond.We seek contributions that reflect the dynamic, transnational, and contested conditions of social worlds, and work that pushes the boundaries of discipline and genre.The publication interrogates the contemporary and historical construction of social inequalities based on race, ethni…
Forensics of Capital
The concept of capital
Comment on Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Theoretical Ramifications of Django Unchained
Manning Marable and the Value of Leadership
Security of Justice
“It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp... with... a Whole Lot of Bitches Jumpin' Ship”
If not quite in these words, some scholars and activists who have promoted a social movement based on the civil rights movement have implied that their project is undermined by “a whole lot of bitches jumpin' ship,” while few bother to question whether and to what extent that movement provides the best strategy for liberation. Fewer still have solicited insight from populations that—instead of mere cowardice or sheer apathy—might possess a social…
Thief's Theme
Though voter theft is an American tradition as old as the right to vote, it has not yet become a key focus of scholarship in the field of political science. Thus, this line of inquiry might benefit from a position that is more critical and imaginative than the one professional political scientists tend to develop. This chapter uses hip-hop lyricism to measure how the concept of theft appears in the political philosophy of Malcolm X against the wa…
Hip-Hop
The tendency for hip-hop enthusiasts to measure the genre against an imaginary golden age evidences a curious brand of nostalgia: a mixture of homesickness, loss, and longing that coheres in the angst of a generation. Meanwhile rappers and politicians blame each other for the demise of disadvantaged communities, as they overlook how each discourse harkens back to a time of prosperity that never existed
Diaspora
How does using the French term for jet lag, décalage , to theorize the gap in time and space that structures diasporic articulation encourage us to think of the period between the dawn of formal decolonization and the present as not merely a structure but an atmosphere of disenchantment: a reminder that diasporic bodies inhabit tactile economies, data streams, born of emotional and financial trajectories that make it impossible to anticipate the …
Commodity
If commodification is endemic to the logic of capitalism, it is perhaps because the space of the sacred—that which cannot have a market value affixed to it—has apparently receded. Still the idea that commodities are born from secular revelations suggests that there is plenty more to be said about the “metaphysical subtleties” and “theological niceties” that occasion their arrival
Killing Time
This article explores a key trope of economic stagnation and chronic joblessness in postcolonial Senegal: the image of "lazy" young men in the public sphere. This civic and moral discourse is critical of young men who allegedly drink tea "all day." But this attitude elides the long history of youth protest against injustice, and excuses a state that has displaced the most strident critics of Senegalese neoliberalism by bribing them with overseas …
Epilogue
The US men’s Olympic basketball team of 1992 reserves an exalted spot in the annals of American sports history. Michael Jordan headlined the team that cast Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in supporting roles; there were no benchwarmers, though, on this all-star squad, which annihilated each opponent and laid claim to the gold medal as if it had been reserved for the unique enjoyment of these superstars. ‘We will perhaps see another great team’, coac…
Prototype
In this essay I discuss some aspects of the Senegalese basketball complex: agents, scouts, coaches, and trainers that operate within this domain and who obsess over the physical characteristics they believe will translate into success for the players they seek to recruit. They consider Senegal to be an especially fertile terrain for discovering new talent. These players are allegedly uncorrupted by the greed that characterizes sport in its most f…
Killing Time
This article explores a key trope of economic stagnation and chronic joblessness in postcolonial Senegal: the image of "lazy" young men in the public sphere. This civic and moral discourse is critical of young men who allegedly drink tea "all day." But this attitude elides the long history of youth protest against injustice, and excuses a state that has displaced the most strident critics of Senegalese neoliberalism by bribing them with overseas …
Racial capitalism
A rectangular Early La Tène Marnian house at Chassemy (Aisne)
The La Tene Iron Age Culture of northern Champagne, France, has hitherto been known almost exclusively from cemeteries there being at least i18 reported for the La Tene Ia phase alone with hardly anything known from habitations. This state of research inevitably gives a distorted picture of Marnian life and has severely limited the kinds of inferences that could be made, including the testing of hypotheses concerning Marnian migrations. A Marnian…
Flirt[ing] with Death' but' Still Alive
This article argues that the tendency in rap music to depict women as accessories and sexual servants is the partial result of a widespread attitude that women have better prospects for earning a legitimate wage than their male counterparts. The effort to devalue women-and, by extension, female labor-leads avowedly heteronormative rappers to displace intimacy onto feminized arenas, like 'the game' or 'the streets'. This is one way of coping with …
Slavery and incarceration in the frontier
This article uses original archival research to revise the scholarly consensus on convict leasing to demonstrate that it first emerges on US soil in Kentucky’s eighteenth century frontier society (rather than in the Deep South in the wake of the 13th amendment) and that it began in a prison filled with incarcerated white people (rather than as a way to keep African Americans trapped in a condition analogous to slavery). Convict leasing was born o…
Theoretical Ramifications of Django Unchained
Epilogue
The US men’s Olympic basketball team of 1992 reserves an exalted spot in the annals of American sports history. Michael Jordan headlined the team that cast Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in supporting roles; there were no benchwarmers, though, on this all-star squad, which annihilated each opponent and laid claim to the gold medal as if it had been reserved for the unique enjoyment of these superstars. ‘We will perhaps see another great team’, coac…
Le Sénégal Qui Gagne’
This essay reveals how Senegal’s effort to promote itself as an anti‐terrorist Islamic nation while aggressively pursuing privatization is linked to the way soccer is promoted internally, to cohere the population around neoliberal aspirations, and externally, as evidence of Senegalese potential. This essay also explores the politics of ‘gagnism’, or the sense that economic development takes place most effectively by strict adherence to a set of r…
Forensics
Deodande is when any man by misfortune is slaine by a horse or by a cart, or by anie other thinge that moveth, then this thing that is cause of his death, and which at the time of the misfortune mooved, shall be forfayte to the Queen ... —Deodand, as defined in a law dictionary (1579) THE ENGLISH medieval law of deodand stipulates that if an inanimate object kills a person, the owner of the “accursed” object must transfer it to God. In practical …
Higher
The concept of capital
Comment on Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Thief's Theme
Though voter theft is an American tradition as old as the right to vote, it has not yet become a key focus of scholarship in the field of political science. Thus, this line of inquiry might benefit from a position that is more critical and imaginative than the one professional political scientists tend to develop. This chapter uses hip-hop lyricism to measure how the concept of theft appears in the political philosophy of Malcolm X against the wa…
Commodity
If commodification is endemic to the logic of capitalism, it is perhaps because the space of the sacred—that which cannot have a market value affixed to it—has apparently receded. Still the idea that commodities are born from secular revelations suggests that there is plenty more to be said about the “metaphysical subtleties” and “theological niceties” that occasion their arrival
Prototype
In this essay I discuss some aspects of the Senegalese basketball complex: agents, scouts, coaches, and trainers that operate within this domain and who obsess over the physical characteristics they believe will translate into success for the players they seek to recruit. They consider Senegal to be an especially fertile terrain for discovering new talent. These players are allegedly uncorrupted by the greed that characterizes sport in its most f…
"Crimes of History" Senegalese Soccer and the Forensics of Slavery
In describing the coercive security measures that characterized George W. Bush's 2003 visit to Gorée Island residents complained that, “It was like slavery had returned.” Despite, in his speech, referring to the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a “crime of history” Bush, that day, traded on the spectral capital afforded by captive Senegalese to diminish the legacy of U.S. involvement in this earlier moment of human trafficking by inadvertently re-sta…
A rectangular Early La Tène Marnian house at Chassemy (Aisne)
The La Tene Iron Age Culture of northern Champagne, France, has hitherto been known almost exclusively from cemeteries there being at least i18 reported for the La Tene Ia phase alone with hardly anything known from habitations. This state of research inevitably gives a distorted picture of Marnian life and has severely limited the kinds of inferences that could be made, including the testing of hypotheses concerning Marnian migrations. A Marnian…
African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective
This book presents new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African urban history and culture. Moving between precolonial, colonial, and contemporary urban spaces, it covers the major regions, religions, and urban societies of sub-Saharan Africa. African Urban Spaces in Historical Perspective presents new and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African urban history and culture. It presents original research and integrates hi…
Moses
Le Sénégal Qui Gagne’
This essay reveals how Senegal’s effort to promote itself as an anti‐terrorist Islamic nation while aggressively pursuing privatization is linked to the way soccer is promoted internally, to cohere the population around neoliberal aspirations, and externally, as evidence of Senegalese potential. This essay also explores the politics of ‘gagnism’, or the sense that economic development takes place most effectively by strict adherence to a set of r…
Flirt[ing] with Death' but' Still Alive
This article argues that the tendency in rap music to depict women as accessories and sexual servants is the partial result of a widespread attitude that women have better prospects for earning a legitimate wage than their male counterparts. The effort to devalue women-and, by extension, female labor-leads avowedly heteronormative rappers to displace intimacy onto feminized arenas, like 'the game' or 'the streets'. This is one way of coping with …
Epilogue
The US men’s Olympic basketball team of 1992 reserves an exalted spot in the annals of American sports history. Michael Jordan headlined the team that cast Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in supporting roles; there were no benchwarmers, though, on this all-star squad, which annihilated each opponent and laid claim to the gold medal as if it had been reserved for the unique enjoyment of these superstars. ‘We will perhaps see another great team’, coac…
Prototype
In this essay I discuss some aspects of the Senegalese basketball complex: agents, scouts, coaches, and trainers that operate within this domain and who obsess over the physical characteristics they believe will translate into success for the players they seek to recruit. They consider Senegal to be an especially fertile terrain for discovering new talent. These players are allegedly uncorrupted by the greed that characterizes sport in its most f…
"Crimes of History" Senegalese Soccer and the Forensics of Slavery
In describing the coercive security measures that characterized George W. Bush's 2003 visit to Gorée Island residents complained that, “It was like slavery had returned.” Despite, in his speech, referring to the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a “crime of history” Bush, that day, traded on the spectral capital afforded by captive Senegalese to diminish the legacy of U.S. involvement in this earlier moment of human trafficking by inadvertently re-sta…
Killing Time
This article explores a key trope of economic stagnation and chronic joblessness in postcolonial Senegal: the image of "lazy" young men in the public sphere. This civic and moral discourse is critical of young men who allegedly drink tea "all day." But this attitude elides the long history of youth protest against injustice, and excuses a state that has displaced the most strident critics of Senegalese neoliberalism by bribing them with overseas …
“It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp... with... a Whole Lot of Bitches Jumpin' Ship”
If not quite in these words, some scholars and activists who have promoted a social movement based on the civil rights movement have implied that their project is undermined by “a whole lot of bitches jumpin' ship,” while few bother to question whether and to what extent that movement provides the best strategy for liberation. Fewer still have solicited insight from populations that—instead of mere cowardice or sheer apathy—might possess a social…
Thief's Theme
Though voter theft is an American tradition as old as the right to vote, it has not yet become a key focus of scholarship in the field of political science. Thus, this line of inquiry might benefit from a position that is more critical and imaginative than the one professional political scientists tend to develop. This chapter uses hip-hop lyricism to measure how the concept of theft appears in the political philosophy of Malcolm X against the wa…
Hip-Hop
The tendency for hip-hop enthusiasts to measure the genre against an imaginary golden age evidences a curious brand of nostalgia: a mixture of homesickness, loss, and longing that coheres in the angst of a generation. Meanwhile rappers and politicians blame each other for the demise of disadvantaged communities, as they overlook how each discourse harkens back to a time of prosperity that never existed
Diaspora
How does using the French term for jet lag, décalage , to theorize the gap in time and space that structures diasporic articulation encourage us to think of the period between the dawn of formal decolonization and the present as not merely a structure but an atmosphere of disenchantment: a reminder that diasporic bodies inhabit tactile economies, data streams, born of emotional and financial trajectories that make it impossible to anticipate the …
Commodity
If commodification is endemic to the logic of capitalism, it is perhaps because the space of the sacred—that which cannot have a market value affixed to it—has apparently receded. Still the idea that commodities are born from secular revelations suggests that there is plenty more to be said about the “metaphysical subtleties” and “theological niceties” that occasion their arrival
Manning Marable and the Value of Leadership
Security of Justice
Forensics of Capital
The concept of capital
Comment on Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the twenty-first century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Theoretical Ramifications of Django Unchained
Style Guide for Authors
As the chief publication of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Transforming Anthropology advances scholarship across the four fields of anthropology and beyond.We seek contributions that reflect the dynamic, transnational, and contested conditions of social worlds, and work that pushes the boundaries of discipline and genre.The publication interrogates the contemporary and historical construction of social inequalities based on race, ethni…
Editor's Introduction
Six / Forensics of Capital
Saint Tupac
Widespread fascination with Tupac Shakur's 2012 holographic resurrection at the Coachella music festival provides the occasion for theorizing human possibility in the context of Afro‐diasporic religions. In considering Tupac's life and legacy, we refer to the spiritual power of his resurrection as an apotheosis, or divine ascendency toward sainthood. However, instead of restricting our discussion to the familiar context of Catholic sainthood, we …
Forensics
Deodande is when any man by misfortune is slaine by a horse or by a cart, or by anie other thinge that moveth, then this thing that is cause of his death, and which at the time of the misfortune mooved, shall be forfayte to the Queen ... —Deodand, as defined in a law dictionary (1579) THE ENGLISH medieval law of deodand stipulates that if an inanimate object kills a person, the owner of the “accursed” object must transfer it to God. In practical …
Higher
History (20 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Political science (17 obras) · Law (15 obras) · History (9 obras) · Politics (9 obras) · Art (8 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras) · Race, History, and American Society (8 obras)