Race in U.S. African-American and Latin American Political Thought

FAIN: FT-229424-15

Juliet Hooker
University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)

Summer research and writing on African American and Latin American Studies, and Political Theory.

Hybrid Traditions analyzes the ideas about race of prominent 19th and 20th century U.S. African-American and Latin American thinkers. It's a philosophically grounded account of racial politics across the Americas via three pairings of one Latin American and one African-American thinker who were contemporaries: 1) Frederick Douglass and Domingo Sarmiento, 2) W. E. B. Du Bois and Jose Vasconcelos, and 3) feminist theorist Angela Davis and Afro-Brazilian intellectual Abdias do Nascimento. It argues that both philosophical traditions contain more complicated accounts of racial identity, multiracial democracy, and black freedom than previously understood. This project's transnational approach is critical to conceiving anti-racist politics in post-racial contexts, and is novel because it engages with both African-American and Latin American political thought simultaneously. It contributes to political theory/philosophy and to the fields of Latino, Latin American and African-American Studies.

Associated Products

“‘A Black Sister to Massachusetts’: Latin America and the Fugitive Democratic Ethos of Frederick Douglass” (Article)
Title: “‘A Black Sister to Massachusetts’: Latin America and the Fugitive Democratic Ethos of Frederick Douglass”
Author: Juliet Hooker
Abstract: This article reads Frederick Douglass as a theorist of democracy. It explores the hemispheric dimensions of Douglass’ political thought, especially in relation to multiracial democracy. Douglass is generally viewed as an African-American thinker primarily concerned with U.S. politics, and the transnational scope of his ideas is rarely acknowledged. Instead, this article traces the connections between Douglass’ Caribbean interventions and his arguments about racial politics in the United States. It argues that Douglass not only found exemplars of black self-government and multiracial democracy in the Caribbean and Central America, he also sought to incorporate black and mixed-race Latin Americans in order to reshape the contours of the U.S. polity and challenge white supremacy. Viewed though a hemispheric lens Douglass is revealed as a radically democratic thinker whose ideas can be utilized to sketch a fugitive democratic ethos that contains important resources for contemporary democratic theory and comparative political theory.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S000305541500043X
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Political Science Review
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Book)
Title: Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos
Author: Juliet Hooker
Year: 2017
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=9780190633691
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry (9780190633691)
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780190633691

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