Tianna S. Paschel has written a beautiful book all around. All chapters are beautifully written and edited; the arguments and insights presented are thoughtful and highly relevant, testifying to Paschel’s intimate knowledge of the racial politics in both countries studied and to the eight years of research she conducted for this book. Everything comes together to form an impressive, informative, and well-researched academic book. Even the cover, depicting artwork by the famous Brazilian artist Ilea Ferraz, is beautiful.

Paschel provides a very detailed account of how black Colombians and Brazilians were able to push for the kinds of changes in law and practice we see today—changes that include broadly applied affirmative-action policies in Brazil and special, collective rights in both Colombia and Brazil; she also launches her own theoretical framework, which she refers to as “Political Field Alignments.” This is an outstanding accomplishment. Her theory argues that national goals were achieved whenever national and international political fields aligned. It is because of such an alignment that one can explain how and why black-power movements in both countries were so successful in achieving their goals—and when—despite the fact that they were relatively weak in their own countries. Their advocacy and pressure for change became successful once they encountered an international political climate that favored the issues these groups had sought to advance, often for decades.

It is, concretely, with the passing of several United Nations declarations following the International Labor Organization Convention 107 for the Protection of Tribal and Semi-Tribal Populations in 1957 that the international climate started shifting toward multiculturalism and the recognition of indigenous and tribal groups. It is this shift, coupled with an ongoing attempt by Brazilian and Colombian political elites to make their countries appear modern and progressive in the international realm, that favored the claims of indigenous and black communities for more (ethnic) self-determination and territorial autonomy. The second “translocal” alignment occurred in the decade from 2000 to 2010, set off by the Third World Conference Against Racism held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, which made Brazil suddenly appear backward and racist on the international scene, pressuring then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to finally act on the decade-old demands of Brazilian black activists and scholars of race and racism. International confluences toward ethnic recognition during the 1980s and 1990s and toward race and racism in the 2000s thus facilitated and indeed influenced the strategies that black activists in both countries adopted in order to advance their agenda—shaping social-movement strategies and the subjectivities of those applying them.

Paschel provides one of the most thorough accounts I have encountered in a long time in academic books that deal with issues of race in either country. She goes back to the transcripts of the National Constituent Assemblies, quoting different participants in these long-lasting debates. In addition, she has interviewed virtually all of the important stakeholders and participants in the two countries’ constituent assemblies, as well as activists, senators, mayors, and ministers. It seems that no door remained closed to her during eight years of research in Brazil and Colombia.

The author’s model of “translocal” alignments in one given political field is able to bring together several models that have been very influential in the study of social movements. The insights provided by Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly on political opportunity structures are not lost here, but fruitfully combined with approaches focusing more narrowly on the internal dynamics of socials movements and their relationships to states, such as resource mobilization, New Social Movement, and protest repertoire frameworks put forward over the past decades by a host of scholars. Her call for a more context-aware analysis of social movements and a more history-aware treatment of racial formation processes are certainly right on point, promising, if followed, to add significantly to our knowledge of both issues.

Just like any other theory, Paschel’s works almost too well, projecting a contrast between Colombia and Brazil that is, by most accounts, not as strong as her approach suggests. Cultural claims for ethnic difference lived on in Brazil well beyond the 1990s, particularly in the northeast of the country, and claims for racial equality never vanished from the agenda of Colombia’s many black organizations.

Overall, however, this book is a great achievement and makes several significant contributions. Most centrally, as already discussed, is the launching of a new explanatory model. The second contribution is not theoretical but historiographical in nature, as Paschel provides a very detailed, accurate, and necessary account of the different political forces and actors in each country leading up to the reforms of the 1980s–90s and the second wave of reforms of the 2000s–2010s. Here, she joins the tradition of such scholars as Thomas Skidmore, Alfred Stepan, and Stuart B. Schwartz, whose excellent and detailed scholarship of Brazilian history has set a benchmark that is only reached in the rarest of cases. This does not come entirely as a surprise, as Paschel was trained and advised by some of the best and most recognized scholars in this field and received comments from almost everybody who matters in the field of ethnic and racial studies in Colombia and Brazil. Her acknowledgements read like a ‘Who is Who’ of Ethnic and Racial Studies on Brazil and Colombia. The whole project, as Paschel recognizes in her beginning lines, is the project of an elite American scholar, trained in elite universities and receiving support from elite of scholars in this field, as well as several highly selective foundations and the US government (through a Fulbright fellowship).

The author is part of a new group of researchers writing about race, democracy, exclusion, and social movements in Colombia and Brazil from a much more engrained and engaged perspective then previous researchers were able to do. While some of these newcomers, like Keisha-Khan Perry, Erica Lourraine Williams, and Christen Smith are cultural anthropologists, others, like Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Gladys Mitchell-Walthour and Ulrich Oslender are sociologists, political scientists, and geographers. They have all spent years living in the countries and regions they study, and they have taken on the plight of local people, writing not just about them but certainly for them—and, at times, with them. This new group of scholars also includes researchers from the region but trained in the United States, like Aurora Vergara and Adriana Parra-Fox, who both teach in Colombia. All of these “new” scholars, most of whom are black and female, have been able to produce the kind of “follower science” that such feminist scholars as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway have long asked for, that is, one that is compassionate and engaged while at the same time rigorous and “objective” in the way that feminist epistemologists have defined that term, namely, as embracing partial knowledge and critical, self-aware situatedness and positionality.

Becoming Black Political Subjects is certainly a must—read for anybody studying racial politics and social movements in Brazil, Colombia, or the Americas more broadly.