This dissertation argues that in the wake of South Sudan’s 2011 independence from Sudan, region has been remade through and around the world’s newest country. This project interrogates ideas about race, territory, and belonging as they have rendered synonymous two processes that seem affectively divergent: independence and partition. The ethnographic point of departure for the project is the insufficient liberation of political independence, the state violence, and suppression that has followed the initial euphoria of independence, and the border-crossing networks that South Sudan’s transnational intelligentsia have produced to navigate their disappointment in the government of South Sudan. Collective disappointment in the South Sudanese state is a primary site for the production of expansive ideas about home, belonging, and family. As dissident intellectuals continue to move and maintain social connections between cities in Sudan, South Sudan, and Kenya, these expansive attachments also reshape a broader regional space from which emerge political perspectives otherwise suppressed within the territorial borders of the nation-state. Following these dissident intellectuals in their region-making itinerancy, I trace the region that has been remade in the aftermath of South Sudan’s independence. The dissertation emphasizes how new geopolitical relationships come to be articulated as transnational ideas about home, border-crossing intimacies, and experiences of family that traverse national boundaries. The question of where South Sudan belongs—regionally, racially, and politically—has become increasingly relevant since its secession from Sudan in 2011. While the formerly unified Sudan generated decades of debate about identity at the African/Arab axis, the place of independent South Sudan has generated new questions about what it means to be East African. The geopolitical perspective of this dissertation extends in two directions to follow how race and space have been re-articulated in the aftermath of political independence. It extends northward to confront what I call the counterlinearity of liberation that has brought South Sudanese citizens back to the site of oppression after decades of war for self-determination. It also extends southward to address East Africa as a keyword containing the aspirations for South Sudan’s future as the state reorients itself seeking ethnic, religious, and economic alignment. This bifocality enables the interrogation of forms of difference in the Global South that take shape as not only derivative of European colonialism but also produced by intra-African logics of being, reason, and morality. To accomplish this multi-sited project, I have deployed what I call region-craft as a method and an analytic that combines the significance of regional economic and political unions, claims to border-crossing ethnic belonging, and the emotional attachments to home that exceed the boundaries of contemporary nation-states.

A primary ingredient in many of the world’s most popular perfumes, ylang-ylang essential oil has long been a staple of the French perfume industry. Few know that the majority of the world’s supply of the coveted essential oil comes from the small Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Comoros, specifically the remote island of Ndzuani. The bulk of Ndzuani’s essential oil production occurs in small artisanal distilleries nestled in the island’s mountains. This artisanal system manages to outcompete and undercut other more efficient large centralized operations based on a traditional plantation system. During times of severe price collapse and crisis, only the artisanal system can produce. This thesis argues that it is the system’s strong roots in local kinship networks that allows it to continue production in times of crisis. Contrary to assumed economic rationality, the tendency of this system to disaggregate rather than concentrate, to decentralize rather than centralize, is more advantageous to the industry’s export capitalists.

This thesis considers Los Angeles in theory and in history, examining key social institutions like the university and the police for the work of “the prevailing oppression,” what Angela Davis opposed while she was an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969, surveilled, harassed, and fired for her politics. I trace the influence on law and racial order of the under-examined nexus of collaborations and contestations between university students and staff and police in this city. Contradictions cluster here around the ideal and practice of “accountability,” a widely prominent regime of knowledge and power in recent decades, the preconditions and effects of which have often been taken for granted or left ignored. Drawing together insights of abolitionist movements and semiotic anthropology, I demonstrate how prevailing institutions in Los Angeles have resisted and incorporated popular pursuits of “accountability” in equal measure.

This thesis examines social cohesion, reproduction, and change through three complementary perspectives. The first part of the paper discusses the topics of resistance and social change, as addressed by several prominent social theorists, as well as how the "agent" or "subject" of resistance is constituted and how "the social" is constructed and reproduced. The second part of the paper discusses some historical foundations of social cohesion and change by examining theories regarding the movement from "traditional" forms of social solidarity to a so-called "modern" emphasis on individualization and "rationalization," which has been accompanied, according to some social theorists, by the progression from social harmony and effervescence to anomie, alienation, and disenchantment. Lastly, the role of language and how subjects are constructed and emerge through discursive practices (and the interdependent relationship between language and social structure and social relations) is considered in the third part of the paper.