:Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas

Abstract

This collection of intriguing and provocative essays is a successful outgrowth of two recent conference panels in anthropology and religious studies, respectively. The chapters, all based on solid historical and/or anthropological case studies, commonly center on race and religion in the Americas, but they deal with differing topics in the historically and geographically diverse times and spaces of the Americas, including the Spanish Floridas, Haiti, Brazil, and Mexico. By bringing such varying topics into a single collection, editors Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister, both scholars of religion, do an excellent job in “exploring the coarticulation of race, nation, and religion—and more broadly, to develop a theoretical and methodological understanding of the complex ways such categories intersect in the construction of collective identity, difference, and hierarchy” (p. 5), while acknowledging that this is “[a]n ambitious project” (p. 21). The twelve essays included in this volume are divided into six distinctive thematic pairs, and, fortunately, the reader is provided with a meticulous summary of each theme by the coeditors. In the first section, on “heathens” and “Jews” in the colonial imagination, Daniel Murphree and McAlister discuss the historical creation of racial categories based on religious differences under European colonialism in the case of Florida and Haiti, respectively. In the second section, on white America and Afro-Brazil, historian Daniel B. Lee and anthropologist John Burdick examine a symbolic association between Christianity and whiteness. Derek Chang and Julia Cummings O'Hara, authors of the essays for the third section, explore the ways by which Christian missionary work in the Americas has reinforced racial divisions for the sake of the white dominant nations. James B. Bennett and Danielle Bruce Sigler contribute the fruits of their research to the fourth section on segregation, congregation, and the North American black-white racial binary. While Bennett examines the important roles of the Catholic Church in redefining race at the expense of the Creole community in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, Singer presents two interesting cases in which the individual's identity politics (“whitening” through ministry) actually ended up helping the nation maintain and even strengthen its racial divisions and social hierarchy. Essays by Kate Ram and Jennifer Snow for the fifth section discuss the nation-states' continuous efforts to police the racial and religious boundaries of “civilization” for the sake of elites in nineteenth-century Haiti and early twentieth-century northern Mexico. The sixth section focuses on rituals and representation of race. Whereas Lindsay Hale examines the aesthetics of Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda in Rio de Janeiro in relation to Brazil's national myth of racial democracy, Judith Weisenfeld, studying Hollywood movies from the 1920s through the 1940s, discusses the projection of blackness on the screen, with special emphasis on the presentation of African American religion.