Theorizing Race in the Americas

By Juliet Hooker ’94. Oxford University Press, May 2017. By juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers—Frederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos—Juliet Hooker’s book will be the first to bring African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation. Hooker stresses that Latin American and U.S. ideas about race were not developed in isolation, but grew out of transnational intellectual exchanges across the Americas. In so doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American thinkers each looked to political models in the ‘other’ America to advance racial projects in their own countries. Reading these four intellectuals as hemispheric thinkers, Hooker foregrounds elements of their work that have been dismissed by dominant readings, and provides a crucial platform to bridge the canons of Latin American and African-American political thought.