My perspective on this exciting and important book is that of a political philosopher originally from the Global South (Jamaica), whose interest in going into the field was initially stimulated by the hope of finding a framework to examine European expansionism and how it shaped the modern world. In other words, the issues of imperialism, colonialism, Atlantic slavery, race as a global phenomenon, and racial justice. It took me a long time to realize how badly I had chosen! Nonetheless, I have been trying in the many decades since my PhD to make the best of a bad situation, primarily through drawing on disciplines outside the formal boundaries of philosophy—sociology, political science, history, International Relations —and then attempting to import their findings and approaches, suitably “translated,” into my home subject. Thankfully, much more material is available for this project than there once was, while philosophy itself, though still recalcitrant, is beginning to show signs of change, for example in the formal recognition of critical philosophy of race as a subdiscipline.

Valdez's book is a great contribution to this emergent body of transdisciplinary literature, though embarrassing for philosophy in particular in bringing home how far we are still behind the rethinking taking place in other subjects. Kant, after all, is our guy! The colonial enterprise, as we know—whether as external colonial rule or as domestic white settler colonialism—shaped the norms and frameworks of inquiry of the disciplines formally dedicated to the investigation of the world, in both their descriptive and normative aspects. But whereas in other subjects, a recognition of this fact has generally been conceded, and begun to be acted upon, in philosophy the resistance has been far greater. This, in my opinion, is a function of the combination of various unique factors: the overwhelming demographic “whiteness” of the profession, far more extreme than in the other humanities, or the social sciences; the antiquity of the tradition, going back 2500 years, that endows it with a far greater inertia; and the self-conceived (“universal”) mission of exploring the human condition as such, which in putatively justifying the ignoring of race, ends up enshrining as the paradigmatic human the privileged white male, with philosophers of color and their distinctive texts being excluded as nonrepresentative.

Consider the central theme of Valdez's book, cosmopolitanism. Here we have a concept that can be traced back, in the Western tradition, all the way to the Stoics in antiquity, but that finds its most elaborated and detailed discussion in recent years in work inspired by the writings of Kant. Apart from his achievements in aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics, Kant has long been viewed as the most important ethicist of modernity, and—because of his appropriation, albeit in different ways, by both mainstream Anglo-American analytic political philosophy (Rawls et al.) and Continental Critical Theory (Habermas et al.)—he has also become central to normative political theory and, through his cosmopolitan essays, the global justice debates. And yet, as a growing body of revisionist literature in the last quarter century has made unavoidably clear, Kant turns out also to be a, or the, pioneering theorist of modern “scientific” racism, articulating in his anthropological and geographical work a color-coded hierarchy of humanity that places whites, primarily Europeans, at the top, and then descends through Asians and Blacks to Native Americans at the bottom. So the obvious question is raised: How are these sets of texts to be related to one another? What are the implications for our received understandings of personhood, the Categorical Imperative, the Rechtsstaat, the teleological dynamic of human progress, the cosmopolitan ideal, and the achievement of the kingdom of ends?

Many mainstream scholars are still refusing to concede that the racism and Eurocentrism have any significance for the “philosophy” (conceived of as theoretically distinct, aloof, and insulated from such debates), let alone embarking on any attempt to rethink the received interpretation in their light. But how could a commitment to such hierarchies be siloed from the rest of his work? Moreover, it is not as if no scholarly precedent exists for the construction of an alternative cosmopolitan vision that is self-consciously informed by the historical realities of European racism and global white domination. What has come to be called the “Black radical tradition” has a long history of political internationalism, most famously in the writings of Du Bois, and the broader anti-imperialist struggle, for example in Asia, would also centrally challenge the hegemonic terms of the imperial political worldview.Footnote ¹ But the problem was, and to a significant extent still is, that the “global color line” of Euro-domination is manifest not just politically but discursively. Within Western philosophy generally, and political philosophy and global justice discussions specifically, the historical and current work of anti-imperialist political activists and theorists of color, if acknowledged at all, is segregated in a conceptual space quite remote from the white mainstream. As shown by the lack of engagement with African American and Global South thinkers, theoretical exclusion, not dialogue, has been the rule.

Transnational Cosmopolitanism audaciously and uncompromisingly breaches this Jim-Crowing of the discourse. This is a book that one wishes a philosopher could have written, while recognizing how unlikely it is, given the current state of play, that the discipline is ready to produce such a text. Rather than a tentative race-informed tinkering with the Kantian apparatus, hoping through the modesty of modification to achieve a respectability that might earn some condescending mainstream attention, Valdez stages a direct and dramatic confrontation—she prefers the term “juxtaposition” (11–12)—of Kant (and the neo-Kantians) and Du Bois. This move is in itself transgressive, insofar as someone not even granted the title of philosopher is being brought into a philosophical conversation. But Valdez is doing much more. What she convincingly demonstrates in this intricately argued and densely researched book is that the very categories shaping contemporary debates, as inherited from the Kantian originals (if in somewhat updated form), are fundamentally flawed in their mapping of the territory. We need a reconceived discursive alternative that would reflect the actual history and geography, the time and space, of the long antiracist struggle of the Global South (including the South “within” the North), and the resources for such a competing alternative are already present in the form of the writings of Du Bois and others in this tradition. So she is offering us not merely a devastating deconstruction of the Kantian framework and the way it has mis-oriented the terms of the conversation, but a reconstruction of a superior subaltern substitute.

Valdez's basic claim (an indictment laid out in the first two chapters) is that Kant's racism and Eurocentrism are manifest not merely in the (by now) familiar racial and civilizational hierarchies, but in the very underlying imperative of his cosmopolitanism. It is not, as it has been standardly interpreted and represented, a prescription for global justice as such, but really focused on “the dangers of colonial conflict for Europe” (1). Purging the apparatus of racist depictions of people of color will not address this fundamental problem, since Kant is really engaged in a project quite different from that ascribed to him in the secondary literature. Even when seemingly sanitized and deracialized, suitable for contemporary neo-Kantian appropriation, the apparatus will be recalcitrant simply because it was never designed to accomplish the goal its present-day adopters have (mis-)attributed to it. Implicit hierarchy remains in the theoretical prioritization of addressing and resolving intra-European colonial conflict as against extra-European colonial oppression, resulting in an awkward lack of conceptual fit with the descriptive and normative tools necessary to tackle the global inequities that are today's colonial legacy. The consequence, in Valdez's opinion, is a trifaceted Eurocentrism not recognized as such by contemporary neo-Kantians, marked by a federative outlook, unworldliness, and ahistoricity. The EU is taken as the model for the vertical integration of democratizing Global South nations while the long record of anticolonial critiques that identify the West's role in creating and sustaining global injustice is ignored, and alternative historic forms of transnational cooperation are ruled out a priori (4–6).

Instead, Valdez suggests, we need to draw on Du Bois's post–World War I writings in particular to develop transnational cosmopolitanism. As explained over chapters 3–5, such a concept “transfigures” cosmopolitanism by (to use the language of John Rawls) contextualizing it solidly and unambiguously within the realm of nonideal theory—not realpolitik (a confusion still too often encountered) but the normative theory appropriate for overcoming social oppression. Unlike the otherworldly cosmopolitanism of mainstream theorists, this innovative Global South cosmopolitanism begins with the recognition of transnational injustice, expands our political focus beyond the domestic and international, and centers political agency not in the “charitable Westerner” but the revolutionary subaltern (7–8). So, contra the kind of reflexive misinterpretations still prevalent in philosophy, it is not a matter of abandoning the universal for the particular, but of demonstrating how putative Western universals have really themselves distortionally universalized their own limited particularities (9–11).

This book is a fine contribution to the literature, exemplifying the interdisciplinary scope and appeal I mentioned at the start, and as such a text that could be read with profit by scholars not just in political theory, but IR, history, African American, and above all, philosophy. There are too many things I liked to mention all of them, but in particular, I was struck by the originality—in retrospect, so obvious, why had no one done this before?—of contextualizing both Kant's and Du Bois's writings with reference to an evolving timeline of events; the recognition that the “problem space” (David Scott) of the Kantian project is very different from one oriented toward questions of corrective global justice for the Global South; the underlining of the ongoing exclusion in the mainstream literature on these matters of the insights of people of color, both historic figures and contemporary thinkers, despite the fact that they are precisely the ones who have been forced to grapple with these structures of national and global oppression; the expansion of the cast of actors and the historical schedule of key events and dates in the official Western Political Drama of Modernity; the redrawing of the imperial cartographies of the polity and the re-periodization of its complementary imperial temporalities; and in general the exposure of a familiar Euro-normativity beneath the assumed guise of postcolonial inclusion and racelessness.