Maxine Kamari Clarke (born 3 April 1966) is a Canadian-American scholar with family roots in Jamaica. As of 2020, she is a distinguished professor at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2021, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.
Education and career
Clarke is a specialist on theories of legal pluralism, international justice, and social theory. She conducts research on rise of the rule of law movement, international courts and tribunals, the export, spread and re-contextualization of international norms, secularism and religious trans-nationalism.
Clarke trained in Canada in political science and international relations as an undergraduate and in the U.S. in anthropology and then in law. She completed her B.A. in political science-international relations at Concordia University in Québec, Canada A few years later, she moved to New York City to pursue her Master of Arts in political anthropology at The New School for Social Research. In September of the same year, she began a doctorate in anthropology at the University of California—Santa Cruz.
In 1999, Clarke relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, to begin a position as an assistant professor in the anthropology department at Yale University. In 2003, she was promoted to associate professor, with tenure by 2007. Two years later, she advanced to the position of full professor with tenure.
During her time as a professor at Yale University, she completed a Master in the Study of Law in 2003. As a professor at Yale, she served as the chairperson of the Council on African Studies (2007-2010) and as the co-founder of the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis. In 2013, Clarke moved from Yale University and took up a position as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania and then professor at Carleton University in 2015. Between 2004 and 2005, she spent a year at York University as a visiting scholar in the anthropology department and in 2015 as a visiting research professor at the University of Toronto. She was a professor of Global and International studies at Carleton University with cross appointments in Law and Legal Studies, as well as in anthropology, from 2016 to 2018.
Clarke is currently the associate editor of the Cultural Anthropology section of the American Anthropologist.
Research and publications
Affective Justice
Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback was written by Kamari Maxine Clarke and published by Duke University Press in November 2019. Affective Justice explores the African Union's pushback against the ICC in order to theorize affect's role in shaping forms of justice in the contemporary period. Affective Justice was the winner of the 2019 Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology and a finalist for the 2019 AAA's Association for African Anthropology Elliott P. Skinner Book Award.
Mapping Yorùbá Networks
Mapping Yorùbá Networks was written by Kamari Maxine Clarke and published by the Duke University Press in July 2004. It is an ethnography of Òyótúnjí, an establishment of the ancient Yoruba Empire that was founded in South Carolina in 1970. Mapping Yorùbá Networks draws from fieldwork conducted in the United States and Nigeria and follows “heritage travelers” who voyage from Òyótúnjí to Nigeria and back. The ethnography chronicles the physical, social and economic landscape of Òyótúnjí and explores the dynamics of homeland identification, the roots heritage market and expressions of transnational politics.
Fictions of Justice
Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa was written by Kamari Maxine Clarke and published by Cambridge University Press in May 2009. Clarke explores how the language of international justice is created through the embodiment of values of human rights in rule of law movements. This book presents that justice is legitimized and made real, in specific socio-cultural practices, through micropractices, such as “citation references to treaty documents”.