Brent Crosson
Biographic Data
| ID | 794006 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brent Crosson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brent |
| FAMILY NAME | Crosson |
| SIGNATURE | CROSSON B |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5453-5981 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
What Is a Petro-state? Masking and Unmasking Power in a Fossil-Fueled World
Ryan Cecil Jobson's The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (2024) is a groundbreaking combination of careful historical research and in-depth ethnography that produces a timely intervention on the politics of fossil fuels in Trinidad. In this essay, the author engages with Jobson's book to argue for the necessity of (1) historicizing the petro-state as a term that carries imperial baggage, (2) rethinking th…
Toward a Caribbean Genealogy of Energy
The story of the rise of “energy” usually centers on the Industrial Revolution and the coal-powered steam engine in nineteenth-century Western Europe. Although it often escapes notice, the Caribbean was actually the site of the first known use of a steam engine to power industrial manufacturing (on a sugar plantation) and the world’s first oil well (drilled by a US company in southern Trinidad). These “firsts” point toward energy’s roots in colon…
Sovereignty, non-sovereignty, and law in the Caribbean
Poetry and the Caribbean
Years after the massacre of bearded men they wanted Cokenot the white powder but the clean-shaven man accused of trafficking his name.Beneath the waves reefs turned white before going greyanimals bleached to stone chins with beards of algae.When they get too warm corals expel the life they make a living off of.Like a body with a fever.Like Jamaica expelled Coke when the heat from the States turned up.The sun was extradition red.The streets were b…
The Subterranean Unsettling of Science, Race, and Religion
When scholars have compared 'African traditional religion' and 'Western science,' they have often treated the terms of this comparison as racialized unitary entities, which are either radically different or somewhat similar (even as Western categories of rationality or nature remain the basis for these comparisons). This essay unsettles these assumptions by focusing on practices that are called 'science' in the fields of both petroleum geology an…
Immigration Policing as Holey War
This article uses the concept of holes rather than borders to articulate the space that US immigration policing engenders. In contradistinction to borders—lines or zones that can be mapped, walled, or policed to delimit sovereign bodies—holes are strategic exceptions to mappable sovereignties. Rather than fixed, mappable boundaries, holes are mutable and in flux, thriving on the shifting potential to appear or disappear and to make people disappe…
Breaking the Heart's Borders
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study
Race, Nation, and Diaspora in the Southern Caribbean
In much of the southern Caribbean (i.e., Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana), ethno-political tensions between numerically commensurable populations of South Asian and African diasporic populations have structured narratives of postcolonial conflict between an "African" and an "Indian" political party, setting the limits of national narratives. This article challenges this narrative on a number of points, drawing on oral histories and ethnographic re…
Banning Black Gods
Between Trinidad and Venezuela
Humanism and Enlightenment
Humanism and Enlightenment are words associated with the birth of rights-bearing Man. Yet this birth was accompanied by the rise of another Enlightenment concept: race. This chapter theorizes the effects of the twinned, contradictory birth of pseudo-biological human difference and “universal” Man. Starting in the Renaissance and concluding in the “posthuman” present, the chapter shows how conceptions of the human emerged from interactions between…
Don't Study People
Throughout my fieldwork on the island of Trinidad, my interlocutors told me "don't study people" because it might lead one to "take on" the thoughts and feelings of others as a kind of weight. In this article, I consider how this cautionary adage about the dangers of proximity reframes:1) the act of studying others through ethnography, and 2) Liberal understandings of the person and society. Within academia's critique of the modern West, proximit…
Inventive Traditions
Experiments with Power
Catching Power
In 2010 and 2011, female students at my field site in southern Trinidad experienced 'mass possessions' that closed down the secondary school. While Pentecostal-charismatic Christians figured African traditions (particularly 'Obeah') as atavisms that caused the events, observers also blamed the 'possessions' on salient markers of a twenty-first-century modernity - particularly the Internet, 'science', citizen insecurity, and illicit transnational …
What Possessed You? Spirits, Property, and Political Sovereignty at the Limits of 'Possession
This special issue brings together two seemingly opposed concepts - spirit possession and sovereignty - to ask how possessing lands, spirits, and selves can alter the theorisation of political prac
The Impossibility of Liberal Secularism
This article re-thinks the problem of religious (in)tolerance by analyzing the 2015 deportation of three “Hindu priests” from a Caribbean nation for the practice of obeah. Defined popularly as “witchcraft” or “African tradition,” obeah was first criminalized as the alleged inspiration for the largest slave uprising of the eighteenth century British Caribbean. I argue that the recent deportations in a nation that constitutionally enshrines freedom…
What Obeah Does Do
Obeah, which colonial ordinances defined capaciously as “any assumption of supernatural power,” was a crime in Trinidad until 2000, and the law continues to make Obeah a punishable offense in most of the anglophone Caribbean. Scholars have noted that contemporary attitudes toward Obeah—a hard-to-define term—are largely negative, implying spiritual harm. My fieldwork in a region of Trinidad regarded as the island's capital of Obeah, however, revea…
Own People
Research Article| November 01 2014 Own People: Race, "Altered Solidarities," and the Limits of Culture in Trinidad J. Brent Crosson J. Brent Crosson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Small Axe (2014) 18 (3 (45)): 18-34. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2826434 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J. Brent Crosson; Own People: Race, "Altered Solidarities," and the Limits of Culture in Tr…
What Possessed You? Spirits, Property, and Political Sovereignty at the Limits of 'Possession
This special issue brings together two seemingly opposed concepts - spirit possession and sovereignty - to ask how possessing lands, spirits, and selves can alter the theorisation of political prac
Catching Power
In 2010 and 2011, female students at my field site in southern Trinidad experienced 'mass possessions' that closed down the secondary school. While Pentecostal-charismatic Christians figured African traditions (particularly 'Obeah') as atavisms that caused the events, observers also blamed the 'possessions' on salient markers of a twenty-first-century modernity - particularly the Internet, 'science', citizen insecurity, and illicit transnational …
What Obeah Does Do
Obeah, which colonial ordinances defined capaciously as “any assumption of supernatural power,” was a crime in Trinidad until 2000, and the law continues to make Obeah a punishable offense in most of the anglophone Caribbean. Scholars have noted that contemporary attitudes toward Obeah—a hard-to-define term—are largely negative, implying spiritual harm. My fieldwork in a region of Trinidad regarded as the island's capital of Obeah, however, revea…
Own People
Research Article| November 01 2014 Own People: Race, "Altered Solidarities," and the Limits of Culture in Trinidad J. Brent Crosson J. Brent Crosson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Small Axe (2014) 18 (3 (45)): 18-34. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2826434 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J. Brent Crosson; Own People: Race, "Altered Solidarities," and the Limits of Culture in Tr…
The Impossibility of Liberal Secularism
This article re-thinks the problem of religious (in)tolerance by analyzing the 2015 deportation of three “Hindu priests” from a Caribbean nation for the practice of obeah. Defined popularly as “witchcraft” or “African tradition,” obeah was first criminalized as the alleged inspiration for the largest slave uprising of the eighteenth century British Caribbean. I argue that the recent deportations in a nation that constitutionally enshrines freedom…
Banning Black Gods
Sovereignty, non-sovereignty, and law in the Caribbean
Race, Nation, and Diaspora in the Southern Caribbean
In much of the southern Caribbean (i.e., Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana), ethno-political tensions between numerically commensurable populations of South Asian and African diasporic populations have structured narratives of postcolonial conflict between an "African" and an "Indian" political party, setting the limits of national narratives. This article challenges this narrative on a number of points, drawing on oral histories and ethnographic re…
Don't Study People
Throughout my fieldwork on the island of Trinidad, my interlocutors told me "don't study people" because it might lead one to "take on" the thoughts and feelings of others as a kind of weight. In this article, I consider how this cautionary adage about the dangers of proximity reframes:1) the act of studying others through ethnography, and 2) Liberal understandings of the person and society. Within academia's critique of the modern West, proximit…
Own People
Research Article| November 01 2014 Own People: Race, "Altered Solidarities," and the Limits of Culture in Trinidad J. Brent Crosson J. Brent Crosson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Small Axe (2014) 18 (3 (45)): 18-34. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2826434 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J. Brent Crosson; Own People: Race, "Altered Solidarities," and the Limits of Culture in Tr…
What Obeah Does Do
Obeah, which colonial ordinances defined capaciously as “any assumption of supernatural power,” was a crime in Trinidad until 2000, and the law continues to make Obeah a punishable offense in most of the anglophone Caribbean. Scholars have noted that contemporary attitudes toward Obeah—a hard-to-define term—are largely negative, implying spiritual harm. My fieldwork in a region of Trinidad regarded as the island's capital of Obeah, however, revea…
The Impossibility of Liberal Secularism
This article re-thinks the problem of religious (in)tolerance by analyzing the 2015 deportation of three “Hindu priests” from a Caribbean nation for the practice of obeah. Defined popularly as “witchcraft” or “African tradition,” obeah was first criminalized as the alleged inspiration for the largest slave uprising of the eighteenth century British Caribbean. I argue that the recent deportations in a nation that constitutionally enshrines freedom…
Inventive Traditions
Experiments with Power
Catching Power
In 2010 and 2011, female students at my field site in southern Trinidad experienced 'mass possessions' that closed down the secondary school. While Pentecostal-charismatic Christians figured African traditions (particularly 'Obeah') as atavisms that caused the events, observers also blamed the 'possessions' on salient markers of a twenty-first-century modernity - particularly the Internet, 'science', citizen insecurity, and illicit transnational …
What Possessed You? Spirits, Property, and Political Sovereignty at the Limits of 'Possession
This special issue brings together two seemingly opposed concepts - spirit possession and sovereignty - to ask how possessing lands, spirits, and selves can alter the theorisation of political prac
Humanism and Enlightenment
Humanism and Enlightenment are words associated with the birth of rights-bearing Man. Yet this birth was accompanied by the rise of another Enlightenment concept: race. This chapter theorizes the effects of the twinned, contradictory birth of pseudo-biological human difference and “universal” Man. Starting in the Renaissance and concluding in the “posthuman” present, the chapter shows how conceptions of the human emerged from interactions between…
Don't Study People
Throughout my fieldwork on the island of Trinidad, my interlocutors told me "don't study people" because it might lead one to "take on" the thoughts and feelings of others as a kind of weight. In this article, I consider how this cautionary adage about the dangers of proximity reframes:1) the act of studying others through ethnography, and 2) Liberal understandings of the person and society. Within academia's critique of the modern West, proximit…
Between Trinidad and Venezuela
Race, Nation, and Diaspora in the Southern Caribbean
In much of the southern Caribbean (i.e., Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana), ethno-political tensions between numerically commensurable populations of South Asian and African diasporic populations have structured narratives of postcolonial conflict between an "African" and an "Indian" political party, setting the limits of national narratives. This article challenges this narrative on a number of points, drawing on oral histories and ethnographic re…
Banning Black Gods
Immigration Policing as Holey War
This article uses the concept of holes rather than borders to articulate the space that US immigration policing engenders. In contradistinction to borders—lines or zones that can be mapped, walled, or policed to delimit sovereign bodies—holes are strategic exceptions to mappable sovereignties. Rather than fixed, mappable boundaries, holes are mutable and in flux, thriving on the shifting potential to appear or disappear and to make people disappe…
Breaking the Heart's Borders
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study
The Subterranean Unsettling of Science, Race, and Religion
When scholars have compared 'African traditional religion' and 'Western science,' they have often treated the terms of this comparison as racialized unitary entities, which are either radically different or somewhat similar (even as Western categories of rationality or nature remain the basis for these comparisons). This essay unsettles these assumptions by focusing on practices that are called 'science' in the fields of both petroleum geology an…
Toward a Caribbean Genealogy of Energy
The story of the rise of “energy” usually centers on the Industrial Revolution and the coal-powered steam engine in nineteenth-century Western Europe. Although it often escapes notice, the Caribbean was actually the site of the first known use of a steam engine to power industrial manufacturing (on a sugar plantation) and the world’s first oil well (drilled by a US company in southern Trinidad). These “firsts” point toward energy’s roots in colon…
Sovereignty, non-sovereignty, and law in the Caribbean
Poetry and the Caribbean
Years after the massacre of bearded men they wanted Cokenot the white powder but the clean-shaven man accused of trafficking his name.Beneath the waves reefs turned white before going greyanimals bleached to stone chins with beards of algae.When they get too warm corals expel the life they make a living off of.Like a body with a fever.Like Jamaica expelled Coke when the heat from the States turned up.The sun was extradition red.The streets were b…
What Is a Petro-state? Masking and Unmasking Power in a Fossil-Fueled World
Ryan Cecil Jobson's The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (2024) is a groundbreaking combination of careful historical research and in-depth ethnography that produces a timely intervention on the politics of fossil fuels in Trinidad. In this essay, the author engages with Jobson's book to argue for the necessity of (1) historicizing the petro-state as a term that carries imperial baggage, (2) rethinking th…
Sociology (14 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works)