|
|
|
Reviews
| Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity. Edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. xii + 288 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
|
|
In what is sure to be an important contribution to the debates concerning African American and Latina/o identity and community formation, the philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia has edited an anthology that uncovers and ultimately complicates our understanding of how we think about race and ethnicity in the United States. This anthology is particularly effective because Gracia is not content to have the contributors focus on the multiple, seemingly random, and imprecise elements of U.S. identity configurations. Rather, he emphasizes four approaches taken by his contributors: replacing race with ethnicity; replacing race with the concept of racial identity; combining race and ethnicity either in the concepts of ethnic race or racial ethnicity; and lastly, keeping race and ethnicity separate, but developing new ways of conceiving them (p. 4). |
1
|
|
The contributors to this anthology do well to avoid rehashing past debates concerning the validity of one term over the other, but instead pursue exploratory, even experimental approaches to rethinking questions of race and ethnicity. Gracia has elicited articles that speak to the meanings of such imprecise identities and their roles in challenging how we imagine, examine, and apply our conceptions of race and ethnicity depending on particular realms or spaces. After a close reading, Gracia evidently poses the title question not as a challenge but as a realization that despite the years of research and publications, race and ethnicity continue to be "slippery concepts" that change regardless of the amount of intellectual production devoted to them. |
2
|
|
The section on "Racism, Justice, and Public Policy" is particularly significant, for its articles document the "application" and uses of race and ethnicity in distinct public policy and legal arenas. This section makes the volume relevant not only to theorists of race and ethnicity, but also to those attempting to understand how race and ethnicity operate in realms outside of the academy. |
3
|
|
Missing, however, is a more detailed and encompassing discussion on gender, sexuality, and geography. While Naomi Zack's piece, "Ethnicity, Race, and the Importance of Gender" is a welcome addition, it is included, ultimately, as an argument to move away from race and ethnicity toward gender. Her statement, "I've recently come to the conclusion that gender is now the necessary and sufficient liberatory fulcrum" (pp. 101–102), is provocative and timely yet not fully convincing. I wondered how privileging one socially constructed variable such as gender would eliminate the uses of the other two socially constructed variables of race and ethnicity. |
4
|
|
The influence of geography and location on racial and ethnic meanings could also have been further developed along with more research on Afro Latina/os and people of mixed heritage. Linda Martín Alcoff does an excellent job of showing how diasporic meanings of race and ethnicity "travel" and become reinvented into altogether different identity and cultural formations. Alcoff reminds us that they are not diluted but become more complicated and resonate with multiple meanings derived from one's home culture and experience combined with that of the United States. For Alcoff, race is a "very real aspect of social identity," and ethnic identities "are 'real' despite the fact that such narratives and practices are endlessly subject to reinterpretation and change" (p. 172). |
5
|
|
By the same token, Diego A. von Vacano, the sole political scientist, is one of the few to employ location as a strategy for tracing and mapping the history of racial and ethnic meanings and processes from a Latin American perspective. Arguing that mixture, mestizaje, is "very much at home in Latin America, but has not had much exposure in North America and Europe," Von Vacano concludes that we "would do well" to accept that the U.S. population comprises many different races and ethnicities—that we are, in the end, a population defined by multiplicity and mixture (p. 266). |
6
|
As the articles in this volume demonstrate, such a claim may not be so easy to for Americans to accept after all. How race and ethnicity will be defined and used in the twenty-first century is the issue at the heart of the volume. While no definitive answer is provided, we are—with the help of an impressive and brilliant array of scholars—beginning to glimpse its potential and possibility.
Nancy Raquel Mirabal
San Francisco State University
|
7
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|