As Jair Bolsonaro claimed victory in the Brazilian presidential election, news outlets quickly dubbed him the “Trump of the Tropics,” pointing to the authoritarian and anti-establishment orientation that have marked the rise of the New Right in the Americas. At the same time, however, the overlapping racialized and gendered logics that propelled the ascendancy of Trump and Bolsonaro are rarely the subject of sustained public discussion. Instead, narratives of national exceptionalism, such as the constant invocation of Brazil’s history of racial mixing and its status as a majority black and brown country, obscure the hemispheric trajectories of white supremacy.
Reading Juliet Hooker’s award-winning Theorizing Race in the Americas in this context is a welcome disruption of the national silos that prevent an interrogation of the entangled histories of native genocide, black slavery, and settler colonialism that mark the Americas. Joining the hemispheric turn in American studies and helping to bring...
University of California Press