In 1845 two thinkers from the American hemisphere--the Argentinean
statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave,
abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick
Douglass--both published their first works. Each would become the
most famous and enduring texts in what were both prolific careers,
and they ensured Sarmiento and Douglass' position as leading figures
in the canon of Latin American and U.S. African-American political
thought, respectively. But despite the fact that both deal directly
with key political and philosophical questions in the Americas,
Douglass and Sarmiento, like African-American and Latin American
thought more generally, are never read alongside each other. This may
be because their ideas about race differed dramatically. Sarmiento
advocated the Europeanization of Latin America and espoused a
virulent form of anti-indigenous racism, while Douglass opposed
slavery and defended the full humanity of black persons. Still, as
Juliet Hooker contends, looking at the two together allows one to
chart a hemispheric intellectual geography of race that challenges
political theory's preoccupation with and assumptions about East/West
comparisons, and questions the use of comparison as a tool in the
production of theory and philosophy.
By juxtaposing four
prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers--Frederick
Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. E. B. Du Bois, and JosÃ(c)
Vasconcelos--her book will be the first to bring African-American and
Latin American political thought into conversation. Hooker stresses
that Latin American and U.S. ideas about race were not developed in
isolation, but grew out of transnational intellectual exchanges
across the Americas. In so doing, she shows that nineteenth and
twentieth-century U.S. and Latin American thinkers each looked to
political models in the "other" America to advance racial
projects in their own countries. Reading these four intellectuals
hemispheric thinkers, Hooker foregrounds elements of their work that
have been dismissed by dominant readings, and provides a crucial
platform to bridge the canons of Latin American and African-American
political thought.
