EVENT DETAILS

LECTURE BY PROFESSOR JULIET HOOKER OF UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

The Department of Political Science is proud to present:

“THEORIZING RACE IN THE AMERICAS:
DU BOIS AND VASCONCELOS’S MESTIZO FUTURISMS”

PROFESSOR JULIET HOOKER OF UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

ABSTRACT: This talk is taken from two chapters in a larger book project,
THEORIZING RACE IN THE AMERICAS: DOUGLASS, SARMIENTO, DU BOIS, AND
VASCONCELOS (Oxford University Press: April 2017), that charts an
intellectual genealogy of racial thought produced in the U.S. and Latin
America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifically, it
enacts a concurrent reading of two thinkers from subaltern philosophical
traditions: the towering African-American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois,
and the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos. Approaching Du Bois and
Vasconcelos as hemispheric thinkers challenges dominant readings of Du
Bois as having a rigid/binary (black/white) approach to race that
downplayed mixture, and of Vasconcelos as erasing Latin American racism
and promoting whitening via his celebration of mestizaje.

BIO: JULIET HOOKER is Associate Professor of Government and African
Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a
political theorist specializing in comparative political theory,
critical race theory, and multiculturalism, and has also published
widely 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). Professor Hooker served as
co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential
Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas
(2014-2015), as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute
of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at UT-Austin from 2009 to 2014. She
has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, most recently
from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been a Visiting
Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Du Bois Institute for African
American Research at Harvard University.