| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City. By Thelma Wills Foote. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. x, 334 pp. Cloth, $71.97, ISBN 0-19-508809-3. Paper, $27.50, ISBN 0-19-516537-3.)

Taking off at least in part from the title of the 1930 classic Black Manhattan by the black intellectual and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson, which popularized New York City's black history, Thelma Wills Foote has retooled her 1991 Harvard University dissertation to excavate the site for what it reveals about the formation of racial identity in early America. With an introduction and epilogue, her tightly wound, three-part, seven-chapter, explication centers race-making in the project of hegemonic colonial state governance of the polyglot populace that built Manhattan from frontier outpost to settler community. Focusing more on the abstract world of theory—of thinking, planning, and explaining with post-event spin—than on the material world of lived experience, Foote pursues the political purposes of race as a means to fix collective identities in deploying power to discipline, dominate, and defend privilege. She ambitiously applies postcolonial theory in arguing that as a discursive category, race became part of "the diffusion of power and the individual's subjection to the disciplinary mechanisms that regulate[d] everyday life" in colonial Manhattan (pp. 6–7).

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