The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American / Hispanic Political Thought
Oxford University Press
November 2011
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199746668; ISBN10: 0199746664
Diego A. von Vacano, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Texas A&M University
The role of race in politics, citizenship, and the state is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modernity. While political thought has been slow to take up this puzzle, Diego von Vacano suggests that the tradition of Latin American and Hispanic political thought, which has long considered the place of mixed-race peoples throughout the Americas, is uniquely well-positioned to provide useful ways of thinking about the connections between race and citizenship. As he argues, debates in the United States about multiracial identity, the possibility of a post-racial world in the aftermath of Barack Obama, and demographic changes owed to the age of mass migration will inevitably have to confront the intellectual tradition related to racial admixture that comes to us from Latin America.
Von Vacano compares the way that race is conceived across the writings of four thinkers, and across four different eras: the Spanish friar Bartolomé de Las Casas writing in the context of empire; Simón Bolívar writing during the early republican period; Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz on the role of race in nationalism; and Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos writing on the aesthetic approach to racial identity during the cosmopolitan, post-national period. From this comparative and historical survey, von Vacano develops a concept of race as synthetic, fluid and dynamic—a concept that will have methodological, historical, and normative value for understanding race in other diverse societies.
Features
- Advances an alternative concept of race as inherently mixed, unstable, fluid, and politically potent
- Links approaches to race in Latin American thought to canonical Western political discourse
- Posits “race” as a central component of modernity and of political theory
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Paradox of Empire: Las Casas and the Birth of Race
- 2. Mixed into Unity: Race and Republic in the Thought of Simon Bolivar
- 3. Race and Nation in the Democratic Caesarism of Vallenilla Lanz
- 4. The Citizenship of Beauty: Jose Vasconcelos’s Aesthetic Synthesis of Race
- Conclusion: Making Race Visible to Political Theory