Book Review: Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, by Juliet Hooker

• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Date: 01 October 2018
• Author: George Ciccariello-Maher
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718762707
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

810 Political Theory 46(5)

child, and (3) to parent children in healthy and safe environments; it also

emphasizes gender freedom and sexual autonomy.2 Given its significant

overlap with intimate justice, it is puzzling that reproductive justice is never

mentioned in the main text (it appears twice, undiscussed, in notes). Yet it in

some ways seems to better fit Threadcraft’s diagnoses and aims than

Nussbaum’s approach. A reproductive justice frame in no way posits white

women’s intimate lives as a standard, emphasizing that—while vastly out-

scaled by anti-black and colonial reproductive violence—young, poor, queer,

trans/nonbinary, and disabled whites have been constant targets of reproduc-

tive oppression; and that even affluent, norm-compliant whites are subject to

neo-eugenic pronatalism and tightly constrained, hyper-commoditized repro-

ductive and dependent care options. Circling back to the question of political

will, rather than the Nussbaumian appeal for positive supports for the inti-

mately injured, reproductive justice emphasizes both white supremacy’s

reproductive crimes and the skin, so to speak, that whites have in the game.

These concerns notwithstanding, Intimate Justice is a game-changing con-

tribution to contemporary political thought. The questions that it raises and

theorizations that it develops will only become more crucial in our class-

rooms, our scholarship, and in organizing for transformative racial justice

that spans body, kin, community, and polity.

Notes

1. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 152.

2. Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger, Reproductive Justice (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2017), 9.

Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, by

Juliet Hooker. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 296 pp, US$53.00, ISBN

9780190633691.

Reviewed by: George Ciccariello-Maher, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and

Politics, New York

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718762707

In Theorizing Race in the Americas, Juliet Hooker helps to bridge a gulf that

should need no bridging, between Americas North and South, and between

experiences of racialization that, while distinct in their manifestations, none-

theless draw from the same broad and swirling hemispheric wellspring.