The Color of Citizenship

In this ambitious study, Diego von Vacano aspires to rescue the concepts of mixed race and race more generally both from neglect within his own field of political theory and from the kind of racialized thinking that informed the renowned colonial casta paintings. Casta portraits, as elaborate pseudoscientific catalogues of the specific human results of reproductive encounters between racially marked peoples in the Americas (such as the painting of the mulatto child who results from the blending of Spanish man and black woman that adorns the book's cover), offer visual evidence of “the Spanish Enlightenment's use of aesthetic forms to enact social control, exercise power, and classify subaltern groups” (p. x). Von Vacano challenges this history with his “synthetic paradigm,” which urges us to instead see race “as essentially mixed, fluid, and dynamic, rather than static, fixed, or rigid” (p. 3). He builds his argument by analyzing key engagements with linaje and other racial constructs in the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas, Simón Bolívar, Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, and José Vasconcelos. All of these, except Vallenilla, are familiar names to Latin Americanist scholars interested in racial discourse, whether in history, political science, literature, or cultural studies. Von Vacano approaches these figures and their texts via a highly sophisticated and erudite understanding of political theory itself (he even returns to the Greek origins of theoria [pp. 141–44]), tempered by the practical recognition that race remains “a central social category of the modern period ... part and parcel of daily life and personal identity” (p. 5). Although Latin American thinkers since at least Bolívar's time have sought to transcend the categories proposed by the casta portraits, race still figures prominently in personal and political praxis. Von Vacano erects his synthetic paradigm in contradistinction to the apologists for assorted “categorical conceptions of race,” whether they be nineteenth-century crypto-racists such as Domingo Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi, indigenista writers, or African Americans in the twentieth-century civil rights struggle (p. 15); he also rejects the hybridity models of postmodernism (pp. 16, 24).The author admits that his model is a fractious one, given that race is multipartite, artificial, and illusory but still part of lived experience (p. 17). Von Vacano posits that by carefully and thoroughly examining the relationship between race and empire in Las Casas, race and republicanism in Bolívar and, later, Vallenilla, and race and cosmopolitanism in Vasconcelos, we can redefine race “in a way that is morally useful for the present” (p. 20). This practical application should resonate not only in Latin America itself but also (and perhaps especially) in the United States and the rest of the world, as the citizens of these regions discover that “miscegenation is not only not immoral, but it is inevitable and perhaps even necessary” (p. x). Whether The Color of Citizenship achieves — or can even hope to achieve — this goal depends in part on its readers' faith in the ability of a scholarly project such as this one to affect quotidian experience in a world where “race is socially real” despite postmodern attempts to dismantle or transcend it (p. 24).Von Vacano reaches deep into the oeuvres of these four authors to trace how notions of race developed from the late fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and he compares and contrasts their texts with those of a surprisingly broad cohort of Latin American and European interlocutors. He makes the case for Las Casas as the founder of modern political thought vis-à-vis Machiavelli; he finds in Bolívar's writings an affinity with Machiavelli's martial republicanism rather than a parallel to Montesquieu, as is usually maintained. He reads the Venezuelan Vallenilla in relation to Bolívar but also finds parallels and differences with Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. Finally, the author urges us to read Vasconcelos not primarily as a champion of Mexican nationalism but as a philosopher deeply marked by Bolívar's idea of Latin American unity as well as the aesthetic conceptualizations of race in Friedrich Nietzsche.The Color of Citizenship makes a strong case for paying more attention to race in the field of political philosophy and for identifying Latin America as the staging ground for much of the debate around it. Von Vacano moves beyond the usual citations of these four authors to provide us with a much more comprehensive sense of how each conceived race, and he successfully places each theorist in fruitful dialogue with their Spanish American and European contemporaries. It remains to be seen if his stated aim reflecting the “normative desire to provide a reconceptualization of race that is useful analytically, normatively, philosophically, and methodologically” (p. 144) will also prove to be “morally useful” (p. 20), given the specialized language and tautologies of his discipline; in any case, this is a commendable effort to rethink race that invites scholars in a wide variety of fields to do the same

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Citizenship · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Humanities · Identity (music) · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Race (biology) · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies in Latin America · History and Politics in Latin America · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy