Disciplinary Divides: New Work on Race in Latin America

"Anthropology," writes Arturo Escobar, "wants to remain a discipline" (xi). Escobar sets this drive against the profound inter- or "undisciplinarity" of his own Territories of Difference, thereby gesturing to a tension between, among, and across disciplines that inspires and distorts work on race in Latin America today. Students of sociology, anthropology, history, literature, and the various "studies" (Africana, American, Latin American, ethnic) all struggle to reconcile disciplinary training and norms with ubiquitous calls for interdisciplinarity in the U.S. academy. Whether one chooses to heed, refuse, or ignore these calls, it is striking how notions of race remain resolutely grounded in specific disciplines. Stanley Bailey's Legacies of Race introduced me to the useful schema of bright versus blurred, hard versus soft, and thick versus thin boundaries. As we shall see, researchers in the humanities and in the social sciences often speak to one another across the hard-bright boundary between qualitative and quantitative paradigms and between definitional and disciplinary camps.

These differences arise despite the good number of concerns shared by recent books that, centrally or tangentially, address race. Of the five books reviewed in this essay, two engage racial boundaries directly and as their main interest, with illustratively different methodologies. Jan French's deft and engaging Legalizing Identities focuses an anthropological gaze on descendants of Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans in Brazil's northeastern state of Sergipe. Bailey's Legacies of Race uses polling data about everyday attitudes to make policy suggestions for fighting racial discrimination in Brazil. Both are interested in the relationship between law and identity, exploring the role of the state in the formation of racial categories, as Escobar also does in Territories of Difference. Escobar comes to the question of identity as part of a larger project: to decenter conventional forms of knowledge in deference to those promoted by indigenous activists. The literary scholar David Luis-Brown shares this "decolonizing" project. His Waves of Decolonization undertakes a literary analysis of anticolonial novels, essays, and ethnographies from the early twentieth century. In a work that provides background for all the aforementioned studies, Matthew Restall's The Black Middle reveals the rich African heritage of a region—the Yucatán—not usually assigned a place of prominence in the African slave trade.

Restall's book is a useful starting point because of the light that it sheds on the emergence of Afro-inflected racial identifications, the phenomenon treated by French, Escobar, and Bailey. Restall documents the tracks of Afro-American culture and presence laid by the slave trade, yet erased in collective memory by cultural absorption and racial mixture. Although the number of Africans brought involuntarily to Yucatán was less than that brought to other New World colonies, they were still a significant presence. Through exhaustive archival gleanings in Mérida, Campeche, small Yucatecan towns, Mexico City, London, Madrid, and Seville, Restall unearths the importance that these migrants and the tens of thousands of their descendants had for racial and cultural mixture in the region. He argues that "not only are Hispanic Yucatecans also Afro-Yucatecans" today but also "the Mayas of Yucatán must now be viewed as Afro-Mayas" (285).

To this bold conclusion, Restall adds nuanced consideration of Afro-Yucatecans' roles in colonial...