Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review]

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

While Goldberg and Gilroy have alluded to mixed-race metaphors in their recent work, Lewis Gordon has written more extensively about the attempts to establish ‘critical’ mixed-race studies. Reflecting on the historical discrimination and colourism in an anti-black world, Gordon has argued that it is understandable – if not morally justifiable – for working-class individuals and darker-skinned individuals to be distrustful of middle-class individuals and lighter-skinned individuals who claim to be progressive. Gordon’s use of slime to describe the aims of a wide variety of mixed-race activists and ‘sensitive’ scholars – who talk politely about racial transcendence while denying the facticity of their privileged position in an anti-black world – is a particularly interesting term since it evokes animalistic behaviour, infantile play, salesmen pitching new, hip commodities for a polyethnic culture. It also offers a transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational engagement with Francophone theory. Aside from adapting Fanon’s critique of European man, Gordon’s analysis of multiracial celebration draws on Sartre’s ontology of slime (a sticky, viscoelastic material that resists shear flow and strain linearly with time when a stress is applied,) and reminds us of Barthes’s famous description of neither-norism (a ‘mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both… It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism… one flees from intolerable reality … one no longer needs to choose, but only to endorse.’)

Daniel McNeil, “‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1, (Post-Racial Imaginaries), July 2, 2012. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/mixture-is-a-neoliberal-good-mixed-race-metaphors-and-post-racial-masks/

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review]

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review]

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 30, Number 6 (November 2007)
pages 1167-1181

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães
Department of Sociology, University of Sao Paulo

In his recent comparative study G. Reginald Daniel looks at the convergence in race relations patterns between Brazil and the US with a reasonable amount of historical information extracted from an extensive literature, yet adds almost no empirical research. His narrative takes a descriptive, reading-notes-like mode as he passes over both countries’ history from colonial times to the present, following too closely different authors’ arguments. His metanarrative, the one that ties together his diverse sources, is a Gramscian–Marxist theory of hegemony and race formation borrowed mainly from Omi and Winant (1986), and Hanchard (1994)…

Read or purchase the article here.

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Mixed Race Studies

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? By G. Reginald Daniel. [Book Review]

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