Oxford Scholarship Online. Available in Oxford Scholarship Online - view abstracts and keywords at book and chapter level. In two thinkers from the American hemisphereโthe Argentinean statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and the fugitive ex-slave, abolitionist leader, and orator from the United States, Frederick Douglassโboth 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.
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.
By juxtaposing four prominent nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkersโFrederick Douglass, Domingo F. Sarmiento, W. Hooker stresses that Latin American and U. In so doing, she shows that nineteenth and twentieth-century U. 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. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity.
We are indebted to Hooker's powerful intervention. Hooker's work is equally significant because it shows how and why we need to examine the complex, progressive, and not so-progressive politics that often arises at these intersections. Hooker belongs to a short list of pioneering contemporary intellectuals exploring the meanings of race and their implications for the private sphere, civil and political society, identity and difference, citizens and foreigners, slavery, fugitivity, freedom, rights, sociality, solidarity, and democracy.
The age of Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil, coupled with retrenchments, realignments, and transformations in polities, their leadership, and their inhabitants' ways of life across the Americas, highlight the continuing rather than declining significance of race.
