John D. Kelly

(PhD, U. Chicago 1988) Professor of Anthropology and Department Chair, does research in Fiji and in India, on topics including ritual in history, knowledge and power, semiotic and military technologies, colonialism and capitalism, decolonization and diasporas. His most recent book, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization, co-written with Martha Kaplan, concerns the constituting of nation-states out of empires. He is currently working on two other books. Laws Like Bullets, also co-authored with Martha Kaplan, concerns colonial lawgiving. Technography: Sciences in the History of Cultures, raises questions for anthropology of knowledge with a focus on the grammarians of ancient India and the engineering of Sanskrit.
E-mail: johnkelly@uchicago.edu

Publications:

1990 (co-authored with Martha Kaplan) History, Structure, and Ritual. Annual Reviews of Anthropology 19:119-150.

1991 A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1993 Meaning and the Limits of Analysis: Bhartrhari and the Buddhists, and Poststructuralism. Asiatische Studien/Etudes Asiatiques 47:171-94.

1994 (co-authored with Martha Kaplan) Rethinking Resistance: Dialogics of Disaffection in Colonial Fiji. American Ethnologist 21:123-151.

1996 What was Sanskrit For? Metadiscursive Strategies in Ancient India. In J.E.M. Houben, ed., Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language. Leiden, E.J. Brill, 87-107.

1997 Gaze and Grasp: Plantations, Desires, and Colonial Law in Fiji. In M. Jolly & Lenore Maderson, eds., Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. U Chicago Press, 72-98.

1998 Aspiring to Minority and Other Tactics Against Violence in Fiji. In D. Gladney, ed., Making Majorities. Stanford University Press, 173-197.

1998 Time and the Global: Against the Homogeneous, Empty Communities in Contemporary Social Theory. Development and Social Change. 29:839-871.

1999 (co-authored with Martha Kaplan) On Discourse and Power: Cults and Orientals in Fiji. American Ethnologist. 26(4): 843-63.

1999 The Other Leviathans: Corporate Investment and the Construction of a Sugar Colony. In Pal Ahluwadia, Bill Ashcroft, and Roger Knight, eds., White and Deadly: Sugar and Colonialism. Commack NY, Nova Science Publishers, 95-134.

2000 Nature, Natives, Nations: Glorification and Asymmetries in Museum Representation, Fiji and Hawaii. Ethnos. 65(2):195-216.

2001 Fiji's Fifth Veda: Exile, Sanatan Dharm, and Countercolonial Initiatives in Diaspora. In P. Richman, ed., Questioning Ramayanas. U of California Press, 329-51.

2001 'They Cannot Represent Themselves': Threats to Difference and So-called Community Politics in Fiji from 1936 to 1947. In C. Bates, ed., Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora. New York: Palgrave, 46-86.

2001 (w/ M. Kaplan) Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization. U of Chicago Press.

2001 (w/ M. Kaplan) Nation and Decolonization: Toward a New Anthropology of Nationalism. Anthropological Theory. 1(4): 419-37.

2001 Postcoloniality. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Oxford, Pergamon, 11844-49.

2002 Alternative Modernities or an Alternative to “Modernity”: Getting Out of the Modernist Sublime. In B. Knauft, ed., Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 258-286.

2003 U.S. Power, after 9/11 and before It: If Not an Empire, Then What? Public Culture. 15(2): 347-69.

2003 (w/ M. Kaplan) My Ambition is Much Higher than Independence: US Power, the UN world, the Nation-State, and their Critics. In P. Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then. Taylor & Francis, 131-51.

2004  Gordon Was No Amateur: Imperial Legal Strategies in the Colonization of Fiji. In S. Merry & D. Brenneis, eds., Law and Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai'i. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

2005 Boycotts and Coups, Shanti and Mana in Fiji. Ethnohistory.

2005  Exclusionary America: Jackie Robinson, Decolonization, and Baseball Not Black and White.  International Journal of the History of Sport. 22(6): 130-153.

2005  Integrating America: Jackie Robinson, Critical Events, and Baseball Black and White. International Journal of the History of Sport. 22(6): 1005-1029.

2006  Who Counts? Imperial and Corporate Structures of Governance, Decolonization and Limited Liability. In C. Calhoun, et al., eds., Lessons of Empire. New Press, 157-174.

2006  Writing the State: China, India, and General Definitions. In S. Sanders, ed., Margins of Writing, Origins of Culture. Chicago: Oriental Institute Seminars No. 2, 15-32.

2006   The American Game: Capitalism, Decolonization, World Domination and Baseball. Prickly Paradigm Press.