This article discusses how contemporary expressive cultural projects in Lome, Togo, highlight practices of racial self-making emerging from urban African contexts through a martial art developed by enslaved Afro-Brazilians in colonial Brazil. This specific case analyzes Nukunu, the country’s first capoeira group, and their ideological constructions of self, people, and historical time. Through capoeira—as a practice that I suggest makes interventions into these three spheres—Togolese martial artists creatively leverage the historical ties across the Black Atlantic as ideological and embodied resources for facing the particular challenges of twenty-first-century neocolonial structures. By analyzing Nukunu’s views on their own racial subjectivity as an extended history of racial oppression, as well as a reenactment of the Ewe ethnic group’s origin story, I argue that Togolese martial artists radically reframe notions of self, peoplehood, and historical time through enacting and performing racialized diasporic forms.

This article focuses on the commodification of Jamaican Blackness and associated images through institutionalized hair-care services. Drawing on the notion of fabulousness (the unapologetic performance of Black feminine beauty), I present findings from ethnographic research conducted in the hair-braiding salon of a resort in Ocho Rios. I detail how Jamaican Blackness unfolds differently depending on the consumer’s demographic category: white tourists, Black tourists, and local customers. I also draw on salon dynamics to unpack the transformative power the salon holds in (1) validating and decolonizing Black beauty and femininity via what I call fabulous hairstyles, (2) normalizing Blackness for non-Black tourists, (3) normalizing Blackness for African American tourists, and (4) creating a space where local Black women may consume resort services with the same dignity and quality of customer service as the Western tourists.

Anthropology’s well-known history of racist and colonial practices continues to inform which bodies go (un)marked with regard to researcher and researched subjectivities, with consequences for methodology and analysis. The imagined unmarked body of the researcher in the ethnographic context disallows consideration of any interaction between their subject position, its attendant histories, and how researchers interact with the community under study. And when the researcher’s positionality is made explicit, it is rare to find discussions of how the researcher’s positionality informed how and what they could observe. This article argues that overtly engaging, not just noting, research positionality in ethnographic texts illuminates underexplored, analytically rich, and pedagogically valuable aspects of the ethnographic process. By highlighting three ethnographic encounters as a Black male ethnographer of young white conservative students, this article explores some of the benefits and challenges of engaging researcher positionality, and how doing so benefited the ethnographic process. This article contains references to sexual assault and sexual violence.

The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) has been one of the most nationally publicized of all protested pipelines in the United States. Since protests began at Standing Rock in November 2016, injustices to the natural and cultural environment inflicted by its construction have been scrutinized by the public, the media, archaeologists, and perhaps most of all, by Tribal nations residing in this area and throughout the United States. In this article, I focus specifically on the ways that the cultural resource management (CRM) process was manipulated and abused to benefit the monetary goals of Dakota Access, LLC and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) over the interests and needs of Indigenous peoples. Following this discussion, I propose foregrounding the suggestions of Tribal nations through greater collaboration with these groups and changes to the archaeological legislation, both of which will lead to greater transparency and inclusivity in CRM.