Juliet Hooker's Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois and Vasconcelos is a critical call to read racial thought through what she terms a hemispheric lens. The lens is one that connects Latin American racial thought with African-American political thought, two fields that are often examined in separate spaces by their respective experts. The book resituates the writings of Fredrick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W.E.B Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos by bringing them into conversation with one another and thus locates the origins of comparative racial politics highlighting the ways in which racial thought travels across borders. Hooker reexamines the ideas of the four men and in doing so, presents a holistic reading of their bodies of work.
The writings and analysis in chapter one follow Fredrick Douglass and his ideas from pre-abolition through post-Reconstruction and make up the richest chapter in the book. Hooker's discussion of Douglass identifies him as a democratic theorist, showing that Latin America and the Caribbean were significantly featured in his writings. Hooker's notion of black fugitivity is a compelling one, as she connects Douglass's experience with his ideas about the Americas as an alternative space for multiracial democracies and black freedom. Douglass tends to misread racial politics in the “other America” (Hooker notes this tendency for all of the thinkers in the book) but the important contribution here is how slavery, Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction all influence and change Douglass's position about where and how black freedom and equality can be realized. Overall, the chapter is fascinating not only for its novelty, but for its detail and analysis of Douglass's journey as a hemispheric black thinker.
Hooker's second chapter uses the work of Domingo Sarmiento to highlight what she calls the “pitfalls of comparison” where his selective readings of U.S. race relations were used to strengthen his anti-colonial and anti-imperial stance. Comparisons of racism in the United States and Latin America have long been misused as Hooker highlights in her fourth chapter about José Vasconcelos, and she notes that this is a practice that continues today. Rather than focus on Sarmiento's seminal text, Facundo, she examines his other writings, which directly engage the United States and use Reconstruction to make comparisons to class struggles in Argentina. One of the most noteworthy connections that Hooker makes between the four thinkers in the book is their mutual position as subaltern thinkers, Douglass and DuBois as black, marginalized thinkers in the United States and Sarmiento and Vasconcelos as Latin American thinkers in the Global South where racial science and global white supremacy marked them with inferior racial origins. Much of what Sarmiento and Vasconcelos wrote regarding race and identity during this time was in response to the racial science of the time, a fact that Hooker highlights is essential to understand the context in which all four men were writing. By focusing on Sarmiento's later writings and letters, Hooker shows the ways in which Sarmiento was an anti-imperialist but curiously looked to the United States as a racial model that embraced both segregation and education based on his observations of the process of Reconstruction in the United States.
Hooker's analysis of W.E.B. Du Bois begins after Souls of Black Folk and chapter three moves away from the notion of him as a black essentialist thinker and instead positions him as a theorist of mestizaje (racial mixture). Rather than ignoring racial mixture, Hooker shows Du Bois recognized that it was often used to reinforce white supremacy and erase blackness and during the time of the nadir (the decades prior to World War II), advocating racial mixture was dangerous and unlawful. Rather, Du Bois saw blackness as a choice and a strategy for unity in an era of racial violence. Hooker discusses Du Bois’ ideational journey through Latin America where he comments significantly on racial mixture in Brazil concluding that racial mixing does not dismantle racial hierarchies. In this and many other places in the book, Hooker expertly challenges the idea that Douglass and Du Bois should be only seen as U.S. thinkers, and introduces Du Bois in particular as someone who forces us to look outside of Latin America to find theories of racial mixture and its relationship to white supremacy and colonialism.
Hooker's final chapter presents José Vasconcelos both through his iconic text celebrating mixture in Latin America, The Cosmic Race, as well as his later writings, which directly contend with racial politics in the United States. Hooker argues that Vasconcelos's intervention on anti-Latino racism based on his time in the United States were intended to convince Latin Americans that they should eschew their allegiance to whiteness in exchange for a mestizo identity. It is here that she finds a resonance with Du Bois and Vasconcelos in their visions of “mixture as futurity”. Indeed both thinkers should be juxtaposed rather than positioned against each other, however, this point deserves more attention. It seems that rather than create a national identity from mixture, Vasconcelos wishes to create a new (darker) form of whiteness that must include mixture but also erases blackness and indigeneity rather than value them, as Du Bois does. The chapter also includes an essential discussion of the travels of Vasconcelos's writings as they are used/misused by contemporary Latino/a thinkers.
Theorizing Race in the Americas represents multiple critical contributions to both political theory as well as the field of racial politics. In addition to the principal claim that we should read race hemispherically, she demonstrates (1) the ways in which Latin American racial thought has both borrowed from and traveled to the United States and (2) the rightful expansion of African American political thought beyond the borders of the United States to interrogate black freedom, black fugitivity, racial mixture, and multiracial democracy. The book insightfully highlights how the role of the West and global white supremacy has created linkages between two previously disconnected geographical spaces of study, thus centering comparative racial politics in the field of political science.
