"Take a tour around Black Liverpool, where race, sexuality, nation, and gender emerge from docksides, demonstrations, and dancehalls. Jacqueline Brown's Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail presses forward a new anthropology of place, in which place emerges with a cultural agency of its own. Blacks become 'Liverpool born,' and the local is simultaneously global and so very English. In this compelling account, Liverpool's place--and the making of race--come to life."--Anna Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection and In the Realm of the Diamond Queen
"Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail is one of the most nuanced, sophisticated, and ethnographically rigorous works on the process of racial formation available, stretching the analysis of 'race' well beyond the by now familiar somatic and political points of reference and theoretical debates. It is also an important and original contribution to our understanding of the spatial constitution of subjectivity and the African diaspora in a fascinating and little-researched ethnographic location."--Steven Gregory, Columbia University, author of Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community
"This eloquently written work engages with a variety of issues encompassing not just the discipline of anthropology but also sociology, race and ethnic studies, and black history. While acknowledging the contributions of others, Brown also contributes something new, both in terms of the theoretical underpinning she employs to the subject and in the fascinating ethnographic details she so expertly draws out of her subjects. This material is exciting and very significant."--Diane Frost, University of Liverpool, author of Work and Community among West African Migrant Workers since the Nineteenth Century