Theorizing Race in the Americas

Book excerpt: Four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. African-American and Latin American intellectuals - Frederick Douglass and Domingo F. Sarmiento, and W. E. B. Du Bois and José Vasconcelos - have never been read alongside each other. Although these thinkers addressed key political and philosophical issues in the Americas, political theorists have yet to compare their ideas about race. By juxtaposing these thinkers, Theorizing Race in the Americas takes up the opportunity to bring African-American and Latin American political thought into conversation, and in turn, maps a genealogy of racial theory throughout the hemisphere.