With The Politics of Race in Panama, Sonja Stephenson Watson addresses the shortage within Hispanic literature scholarship of research on Afro-Panamanian literature and the sole focus on West Indian–descended writers in studies on black literature in Panama. Specifically, Watson examines how Afro-Hispanic and West Indian–descended writers, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, utilized poetry, novels, plays, and short stories to negotiate and develop an Afro-Panamanian identity. Watson grounds this discussion in a rich analysis that includes nationalism within race debates, anti-imperialism and anti–West Indian attitudes, historical revisionism, and the possibility of postracial writings.Afro-Hispanic authors in Panama, Watson notes, have from their earliest writings negotiated questions of nationalism, race, and exclusion. Two such writers included the poets Federico Escobar and Gaspar Octavio Hernández. Both wrote at the height of Panama's independence movement from Colombia and during the early decades of the new republic. Many of their nationalist poems would go on to be canonized by the Panamanian literary community. As Watson's study contends, however, both men, like their neighbors in Cuba and Costa Rica, struggled to address their realities as black men in a nation that continued to marginalize Afro-descendants. This led to their development of a “bipolar racial consciousness” (p. 41) whereby Escobar and Hernández upheld panameñidad, or euphoric Panamanian nationalism, even as they recognized its race-based limits.The upholding of panameñidad, particularly as a counter to US imperialism, shaped much of the novelistic work of Joaquín Beleño, another Afro-Hispanic writer featured in Watson's text. Beleño, unlike his predecessors and midcentury contemporaries, focused his literary work on the patriotism and cultural uniqueness of urban communities of color. Through Beleño's novels readers also learned of the US Canal Zone and the struggles faced by residents of the cities bordering this area. Yet, as Watson observes, in his depictions of urban Panama and the Canal Zone, Beleño largely presented a caricature of West Indians and their descendants, often equating this group with US imperialism.For Panamanian writers of West Indian descent, Beleño's novels, which received national praise, propagated dangerous stereotypes. Watson reviews the works of four writers — Carlos Guillermo Wilson, Melva Lowe de Goodin, Gerardo Maloney, and Carlos E. Russell — who, beginning in the 1980s, challenged these stereotypes. In his novels Wilson focused on portraying the realities of West Indian–descended Panamanians and writing against continued discrimination in the republic. Such a focus, Watson concludes, has led to Wilson's exclusion from the Panamanian literary canon. In turn, playwrights such as Lowe de Goodin targeted misinformation about West Indians by creating a world where female oral historians offered corrected histories of West Indian migration and community making in Panama. As poets and novelists, Maloney, Wilson, and Russell likewise looked to a broader Afrocentric and Caribbean diaspora to connect these histories to that of Afro-descendants with links to Africa, Panama, the wider Caribbean, and the United States. This look beyond Panama, and in particular to the Caribbean, symbolizes for Watson the rich histories that formed part of creating a “unified Afro-Panamanian identity” into the twentieth century and beyond (p. 127).Watson's study culminates in an examination of the work of short story writers Melanie Taylor and Carlos Oriel Wynter Melo, both of whom are of West Indian ancestry but rarely self-identify racially in their stories. This, Watson explains, is due to neither writer feeling limited by race in their literary works. As a result, they write stories exploring humanistic experiences that come with being young, female, male, fat, and a reader of history, among others. Watson cautions, however, against assuming the possibility of postblack or postracial identities in twenty-first-century Panama, given that Afro-Hispanics and West Indian descendants are still formulating an Afro-Panamanian identity. The absence of Afro-Hispanic writers in this section of the text nonetheless raises the question of whether Watson is unwittingly only thinking of West Indian–descended Panamanians as she writes about ongoing Afro-Panamanian identity development.The Politics of Race in Panama is a welcome contribution to studies of literature and race formation in Panama and the greater Caribbean and Latin American region. A more nuanced conversation about how terms like Hispanic, blackness, and mestizaje have evolved in Panama could have added to the strength of the text. Also of interest could have been a review of the works produced by Afro-Hispanics and West Indian descendants during the same time periods, as well as the writings of individuals who identified with both groups. In all, Watson's study is an important text for historians and literary scholars interested in the intersections of cultural production, race, identity, and the futures of Afro-diasporic populations in the Americas.