Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States

Abstract

In this groundbreaking book, David Luis-Brown methodically and convincingly turns postcolonial studies and American studies on their heads and casts a keen, hemispheric eye on the anticolonial discourses of author-activists like José Martí (Cuba), Claude McKay (Jamaica), and W. E. B. DuBois (United States). With a North-South gaze, he transcends the limits of the nation and reveals his understanding of how the work of certain Cuban, Californio, Mexican, Jamaican, and U.S. writers exemplify the antiracist, anti-imperialist, local/global struggles that were being taken up by discriminated and displaced peoples in the Americas during the 1880s–1930s.Luis-Brown presents the essays, novels, and poetry of Martí, McKay, and DuBois, along with authors like Nicolás Guillén and Jesús Masdeu (Cuban), María Amparo Ruiz de Burton (Californian), Helen Hunt Jackson (U.S.), and Miguel Ángel Menéndez (Mex-ican) to expose the sociocultural and politico-economic aftermath of the “American century,” the period of territorial expansion to the west and southwest (after the United States annexed Texas in 1845 and provoked the Mexican-American War in 1846–48), and to the south and the Caribbean (after the Spanish-American War of 1898). This expansion inspired the aforementioned writers and others to contribute to a rich production that reflects and promotes a sentimentalist but universalizing and relational approach to indigenismo, negrismo, mestizaje, and to the problems of racism, human rights, and decolonization.After solidly establishing that DuBois and Martí “construct history as a story of successive waves of decolonization and democratization,” Luis-Brown goes on to examine how this transnational framework reveals how writers and thinkers from across different national, linguistic, and politico-cultural boundaries strove to establish the concept of hemispheric citizenship as the one unifying idea that could bring together and empower diverse groups of disenfranchised people. In chapter 1, Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885) are shown to expose and critique conflicts over land, class, and race in the United States, all in the context of other U.S. sentimentalist writing by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and Alexander Kinmont. In chapter 2, Martí and DuBois are shown to promote civil rights, a “human brotherhood” that extends beyond race and speaks of a need for “broader unities.” Chapter 3 contextualizes works by Mexicans Manuel Gamio, José Vasconcelos, and painter Diego Rivera, Dominican essayist Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Jamaican Claude McKay, Cubans Jesús Masdeu and Nicolás Guillén, and U.S. writers and intellectuals Langston Hughes, Carleton Beals, and Katherine Anne Porter. It recasts in transnational terms Mexican indigenismo and negrismo and the Harlem Renaissance, which were initially seen as distinct national and ethnoracial discourses, to combat what these authors saw as a neocolonial “co-opting” of primitivism as a weapon against European-style “civilizing” discourse. Chapter 4 examines the work of German American anthropologist Franz Boas, Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, American sociologist Robert E. Park, and American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston to reveal how they theorized race, hybridity, and migration and created virtually a “new ethnography” for the modern city. In the book’s final chapter, Luis-Brown brings the reader to the first decade of the twenty-first century to illustrate how contemporary immigrant activist groups throughout the Americas are deploying hemispheric citizenship as a strategy to address the economic, political, and racial problems facing migrants in the United States and elsewhere.Waves of Decolonization is convincing in its argument for a transnational, decolonizing approach to American studies. It is accessible, grounded, and thorough. It will equally captivate researchers and students of this hemisphere and anyone interested in an alternative understanding of this hemisphere’s intertwined history and destiny. Luis-Brown’s approach is a refreshing and very necessary shift away from the national, ethnolinguistic, and racial boundaries that have most often defined American, African American, Latino, Mexican, Mexican American, Cuban, and Caribbean studies. Furthermore, it is equally important that his recasting of the ethnic and nationalist discourses of the 1880s–1930s has crucial relevance for today, a time of intense world migration and globalization. Contemporary discourses that address the borderless nature of human migration and capital most certainly have their roots in the thinkers and writers of this earlier period, an era whose production Luis-Brown captures and examines masterfully.