Theorizing Race in the Americas: The Mestizo Futurologies of Du Bois and Vasconcelos
Juliet Hooker, Associate Professor, Government and African/African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas, Austin
4.18.16, 12:30 – 1:45 pm, 408 Oak Hall
Sponsored by the Africana Studies Institute; UCHI Political Theory Workshop; El Instituto; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
This talk is taken from two chapters in a larger book project that charts a hemispheric intellectual genealogy of leading racial theories produced in the Americas that operated in dialogue across the hemisphere because they were all formed in relation to an American other (North America for the South, Latin America for the North). The book maps a hemispheric set of concerns and ideas via a concurrent reading of two subaltern traditions, U.S. African-American and Latin American political thought. The talk will focus on Part II of the book, which juxtaposes the writings on racial mixture of W. E. B. Du Bois and José Vasconcelos. Du Bois and Vasconcelos formulated two strands of oppositional thinking to the scientific racisms of the early decades of the twentieth century. In different ways their arguments allow us to interrogate the difficulties faced by attempts to forge black internationalisms and Latin American Pan-Americanisms in order to challenge global white supremacy.
Juliet Hooker is Associate Professor of Government and of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She is a political theorist specializing in comparative political theory and critical race theory. Her primary research interests include black political thought, Latin American political thought, political solidarity, and multiculturalism; she has also published on Afro-descendant and indigenous politics and multicultural rights in Latin America. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2009), and is currently completing a book tentatively entitled Theorizing Race in the Americas: An Intellectual Genealogy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Her articles have appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review, Politics, Groups and Identities, Souls, Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research Review, and Political Theory.
FOOD AND DRINK WILL BE SERVED
For more information, contact: Fred Lee at fred.lee@uconn.edu