Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos

Juliet Hooker's Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (2017) is an outstanding scholarly work within contemporary political philosophy. While the book itself offers a compelling set of analyses regarding race, national and pan-national identities, and democratic theory, it is Hooker's scope, methodological innovativeness, and theoretical complexity that make the work exceptional. Hooker's analytic focus addresses political theory across several U.S. African American and Latin American contexts, and provides a novel approach to the study of four major figures within these respective fields. Namely, the book surveys the writings of Frederick Douglass, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and José Vasconcelos. More specifically, she examines how each thinker interprets race through a hemispheric lens across the Americas. For example, she analyzes how Douglass and Du Bois, in their efforts to understand and interpret their own domestic and, at times, international political concerns, each discussed Latin American models of miscegenation, immigration policy, and political mobilization strategies among Afro-descendent communities in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Similarly, the book analyzes Sarmiento's and Vasconcelos's respective conceptions of U.S. policies on abolitionism, segregation, and education, and the two theorists' considerations of these issues for Latin American forms of national cohesion and stability. As such, Theorizing Race in the Americas, both through its method and content, successfully bridges discourses of race that are rarely explored together within political theory. In what follows, I briefly frame some of the major methodological and theoretical contributions that Theorizing Race in the Americas offers to contemporary scholars interested in U.S. African American and Latin American political thought. I then examine several points for further research that Hooker's work invites from readers.The book is organized into two main sections. The first, “Ambas Américas” (Both Americas), takes up the work of Douglass and Sarmiento, two thinkers whose writings and active political lives spanned the nineteenth century. Notably, both thinkers published their first major works in 1845. Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was published in Boston less than seven years after he escaped from slavery, and Sarmiento's Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism was published that same year in Santiago, Chile, while the author was living in exile from his birthplace of Argentina. Hooker notes that these thinkers are never read alongside one another, despite their immense political influence. The reasons for this, she proposes, are likely that the respective thinkers never engaged one another's work, and, given their geopolitical locations, are often considered to have very different preoccupations with respect to race (1). Douglass's political interventions focused largely on abolitionism and anti-black racism in the United States, while Sarmiento's principle interests were in securing post-independence forms of republicanism across Latin America, which included, for Sarmiento, an unambiguous form of anti-indigenous racism that he considered necessary to ensure political unity. Against this trend, Hooker situates these two thinkers in relation to one another to examine their overlapping positions vis-à-vis race, democratic theory, and the continued relevance of their respective political views.The second part of the book, titled “Mestizo Futurisms,” examines questions regarding political progress, racial mixing/mestizaje, and transnational networks of solidarity via the writings of Du Bois and Vasconcelos. Both Du Bois and Vasconcelos were immensely influential early- to mid-twentieth-century political figures and writers, and their respective works sought, to varying degrees, to build on the earlier efforts of their predecessors (Douglass in the case of Du Bois, and Sarmiento in the case of Vasconcelos). However, as with Sarmiento and Douglass, these two authors are rarely read in relation to one another. Again, the reasons for this are that the two are often considered to hold starkly different positions regarding race. For example, Du Bois's early writing on the continued relevance of race in “The Conservation of Races” (1897) is sometimes seen as evidence that he held “a rigid, essentialist conception of race that militated against any acknowledgement of mixture” (124). Vasconcelos's La raza cósmica (1925), on the other hand, is often considered a foundational work in Latin American theorizations of mestizaje, a view that is often interpreted as a form of racial optimism reliant upon biological and cultural mixture as a solution for problems of political unrest. Despite these commonly-held conceptions of their respective works, Hooker reads these authors in a new light, focusing on less commonly engaged texts in each authors' corpus. Hooker focuses on Du Bois's fictional writings Dark Princess (1928) and “The Comet” (1920), which she calls his “mulatto fictions” that she considers through the lens of the aesthetic and literary movement of Afro-futurism. She thus positions these works as counterevidence to views of Du Bois that consider his conception of race to be essentialist or non-dynamic. Likewise, for Vasconcelos, Hooker reads lesser known texts from his corpus such as Indología (1926) and Bolivarismo y Monroísmo (1934) to demonstrate the author's more radical criticisms of global white supremacy, U.S. interventionism, and anti-Latina/o racism in the United States (160).To analyze these vastly distinct thinkers and geopolitical contexts together is no easy task, and Hooker takes immense care to tie together these seemingly disparate bodies of political theory. One significant point of overlap across all four theorists, she proposes, is their “shared albatross: scientific racism” (5). That is, all four thinkers are immersed in philosophical and political traditions that must grapple with the tremendous outpouring of scientific writings, conferences, and debates about the relative inferiority and superiority of racial groups. Hooker thus situates Douglass and Sarmiento within a period of scientific racism spanning from 1850–1890 that focused primarily on questions regarding whether different racial groupings were descended from common origins (e.g. debates regarding monogenesis or polygenesis), and questions regarding the influence of climate and geography on the supposed inferiority and degeneration of nonwhite groups. For Du Bois and Vasconcelos, she argues, the racist science of eugenics spans 1890 to 1940 and influenced the writings of both thinkers. Moreover, both Du Bois and Vasconcelos, Hooker writes, “had a shared intellectual foe in racist science, particularly the ideas of US eugenicist Madison Grant” (9). Considerations over the ability to “improve” human societies by determining which racial groups were “fit” and “unfit” for continued survival and “civilization” were common concerns among eugenicists, including those in Grant's The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History (1916) (10). This shared scientific context for Du Bois and Vasconcelos provides a pivotal connection between their respective writings.Given these shared resonances, it is important to highlight the innovative methodology that Hooker employs to study both U.S. African American and Latin American political thought. Namely, she develops what she describes as a practice of “juxtaposition,” an approach that she contrasts with a more common form of analysis in political thought that she calls “comparison.” Unlike comparative methods for transnational analyses of race, juxtaposition interrogates “the boundaries between traditions as contingent products of political power” (13). Thus, instead of assuming that each geopolitical context is itself a fixed entity or that each thinker is solely influenced by his given national context, Hooker adopts a robustly “historical-interpretive approach that seeks to situate the resonances and/or discontinuities between traditions of thought within the specific historical, intellectual, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts in which they emerged” (13). Hooker also elaborates a second feature of comparative approaches that she seeks to reject as well, namely, the comparative exercise of ranking differing racial politics across distinct geopolitical contexts. In Theorizing Race in the Americas, however, rather than studying U.S. African American and Latin American political theorists alongside one another for the sake of arriving “at an assessment of which of these two traditions has formulated the better approach to race,” Hooker offers a method that seeks to examine how theorists from these traditions have themselves often engaged in such forms of comparative assessment (12). Thus, she interrogates how each thinker has often ended up misreading or mistakenly looking to “the other America” as a site of racial progress or decline (12). For example, with respect to Douglass, she examines the author's writings and editorial work that engages the political efforts of Black, indigenous, and mixed-race populations in Haiti, Santo Domingo (what is now the Dominican Republic), and in Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast. In Sarmiento's writings, she examines his correspondence with U.S. educational reformer, teacher, and abolitionist, Mary Mann, in which both interlocutors discuss their respective views on Black suffrage and the education of freed ex-slave populations (94).One additional thread that juxtaposition helps outline—and a recurrent theme throughout the book—is how conceptions of the possibility of stable political futures can often become based in comparative methods of analysis as well. That is, the possibility of political harmony elsewhere can provide the normative means to motivate local efforts toward social reorganization. Yet, as Hooker highlights throughout the book, the consequences of these forms of comparative ranking can often lead to political consequences that may be antithetical to contemporary decolonization efforts. U.S. interventionism, for example, can be justified on a similar comparative premise, and Hooker does not overlook Latin American concerns about U.S. imperial and economic expansionism. Specifically, her chapters on Douglass, Sarmiento, and Vasconcelos each engage extensively with problems of U.S. expansionism. A similar consequence of such forms of comparison can be found in Hooker's critical attention to discourses of racial harmony within Latin America, which often present overly generous and misleading interpretations of the rights of Afro-descendant and indigenous populations in Latin America.With this methodological framing in place, Hooker also remains attentive to questions regarding transnational solidarity among racialized populations. Her chapter on Du Bois's Afro-futurist fiction provides a compelling reinterpretation of Du Bois as a theorist embroiled in the pursuit of global anti-colonial, and antiracist revolutionary politics. The formulation of global anti-colonial and antiracist struggle in the book harkens back to Hooker's concise studies of political solidarity and collective rights for Afro-descendent and indigenous peoples in Latin America (e.g. 2008, 2009a; 2009b), and her critical approaches to mestizo nationalism, contemporary multiculturalism, and “Latino racial exceptionalism”1 appear to build from her earlier writings in this vein as well (e.g. 2005a; 2005b; 2014).Additionally, Hooker's analysis of black fugitivity and democratic fugitivity in Douglass's thought carefully mark the tensions between these two traditions, and she presents Douglass's contributions to democratic theory as a concerted effort toward transnational Black solidarity (29; 57). More specifically, Hooker draws from the work of Sheldon Wolin (1994), Neil Roberts (2015), and Anthony Bogues (2012) to place Douglass “squarely within [both] the tradition of black fugitive thought” and fugitive democratic theory (34). She thus frames the tensions between these views as a set of disagreements about the role of the state as a site for Black freedom. Fugitive democracy, she writes, “would seek to reshape the moral dispositions of the dominant racial order, [while] black fugitivity is oriented instead to the creation of sites of black freedom that refuse of challenge the logics of coloniality and exceed or bypass the nation-state” (39). With these tensions in mind, she reads Douglass's writings on the annexation of Santo Domingo and his political involvement in the controversy regarding the Haitian port of Môle St. Nicolas in the 1890s as evidence for his oscillation “between the two polarities of democratic and fugitive hope” (57). In this sense, Douglass's position on the possibility of an impermanent and contingent form of democratic freedom via the modern nation-state, and his search for sites of Black freedom that exceed the white supremacist foundations of the modern nation-state become evident through Hooker's close readings of his work.Hooker's text is thus groundbreaking in many ways, and the scope of her scholarship speaks to the immense philosophical contributions that are possible when political theorists are trained to contextually analyze differing geographic, historical, and linguistic traditions. As such, I consider Theorizing Race in the Americas a welcomed invitation to engage in further transnational studies of race. To demonstrate how the book encourages this work, I offer here a few points for further extension and critique in response to a few of Hooker's analyses offered in the book.First, one potential area of analysis offered via Hooker's chapter on Sarmiento is further investigation into the relationship between Sarmiento's writings on race and evolutionary theory. Hooker argues that the U.S. school of ethnology and Louis Agassiz, a prominent critic of evolutionary theory and of Darwin, were quite influential for Sarmiento's thinking about race, and their influence can be found in his 1883 work Conflicto y armonías de razas en América. This reading of Sarmiento also shapes the way in which Hooker situates Sarmiento's work in relation to the United States. She proposes that by 1847 the author “turned away from Europe as his political model and looked to the United States instead” (80). While Hooker provides a thorough analysis of the invocations of Agassiz in his writings, and suggests a decline of his interest in “Europeanizing” Latin America by his 1860s writings, there are several other potential avenues to explore to contextualize this period of his thinking as well. For example, one body of scholarship on Sarmiento's writings focuses specifically on his interest in Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this vein, Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine (2010) trace how Sarmiento showed great interest, like many of his contemporaries, with evolutionary theory throughout his corpus. In his 1850 Recuerdos de provincia, for instance, he appears to demonstrate a belief in the inheritance of acquired traits, a view popularized in Argentina via the writings of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (38). Moreover, in an autobiographical work in 1886, Sarmiento writes of his early interests specifically in Darwin, stating that he bought the sixth edition of Scottish evolutionary theorist Robert Chambers's book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1847 while visiting London. Sarmiento states explicitly that this book “prepared” his thinking on evolution prior to Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species (Novoa and Levine 39). Novoa and Levine also note that, in 1868 after recently traveling to the U.S., Sarmiento writes of his familiarity with the disputes between Agassiz and Darwin, and asserts that “Darwin's theory was Argentine” (77), and that Sarmiento sought, in his own words, to “nationalize it” within the country.The significance for Sarmiento's invocations of Darwin will be most apparent to readers of Theorizing Race in the Americas who are familiar with mid- to late-nineteenth century evolutionary theory and debates about how differing views within the biological sciences impacted conceptions of race during the period. These included, for example, discussions about degeneracy, miscegenation, and educational reform. Sarmiento, as Novoa and Levine propose, attempted to “add design to Darwin” despite his apparent acknowledgement that such a stance on directed variation was inconsistent with Darwin's own position (77). Sarmiento also wrote in 1883 in a letter to Francisco Moreno, a prominent naturalist of the period, that “I get along with [Herbert] Spencer. We follow the same path” (168). Given, these references to his own thinking about Spencer and Darwin, further examinations of this period in Sarmiento's writings may be important to determine the extent to which U.S. ethnology, Agassiz, and the United States as a site for discourses on race was pivotal for Sarmiento.Another interpretive possibility may be, as Sarmiento's eulogy for Darwin in May of 1882 suggests, that Sarmiento gave preference to Darwin's evolutionary theory above Agassiz's. For example, he writes in that address, regarding Agassiz's expedition to Brazil in the 1860s in which Agassiz studied varieties of fish found in the Amazon River system, that Agassiz supposedly confesses in his writings that he found evidence that supported Darwinian evolutionary theory and monogenesis. Despite this somewhat misleading interpretation of Agassiz's work, the conclusion that Sarmiento offers is the claim that “we who are satisfied with fewer species of fish in our rivers, let us be content, then, with the near confession of one who searched the Amazon in search of evidence with which to combat transformationist ideas and failed to find it” (Sarmiento [1882] 2012, 137). “Transformationism” in this context refers, roughly, to the view that one species evolves into another, a view that Agassiz explicitly denied. Moreover, he this with the claim that further evidence against Agassiz's views can be found and supported by the work of the naturalist and point regarding Sarmiento's relationship to however, is not a determining for whether or not he a anti-indigenous form of racism or views of Afro-descendent as Hooker in the book The here is how Sarmiento's readers to interpret his views regarding evolutionary theory and to what extent these views impacted his about miscegenation, racial and As such, Hooker's book invites further analysis within political theory on the influence of Agassiz, Darwin, and other of the period within and other Latin American and U.S. debates regarding Hooker's attention to the role and of Vasconcelos's conception of within is another site of analysis in the Hooker states that by as the U.S. and in more than those of Vasconcelos However, Hooker also argues that was to the inheritance of Vasconcelos's racial and not an critique of the way of the that was an part of the cultural and that gave to the new mestizo As such, she writes that this her from a critique of his theory of these readers of corpus may be to this critique in of the throughout in which addresses during the of what is considered and her critical analysis of the continued and of of that has For example, one such by Hooker near the of describes mestizo forms of and that are to La the indigenous who was to the writes, or has become known as the who her to the are with The has into with for and in the century. 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I thus Hooker's text an invitation to scholars for more hemispheric and transnational analyses of race, and and international for antiracist and