Review Essay: Theorizing Race, Theorizing Politics

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221128979
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 253 –261

© The Author(s) 2022

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1. Heath Fogg Davis, “The Racial Retreat of Contemporary Political Theory,”

Perspectives on Politics 1 (September 2003): 555–64.

Book Review

Book Review

Abstract

While most of Political Theory’s 50th anniversary issue looks forward to

imagining political theory in the future, the Book Review section looks

backward to consider those books and schools of political theory not

reviewed on the pages of the journal—but which went on to shape the field

nonetheless. The aim of this section is not to constitute a new and newly

virtuous canon, but rather to goad readers to reflect anew on knowledge

production and the institutional and circulatory practices that compose it,

reaching from journal readers, to classrooms and conferences, and on to

late night conversations and confabulations.

Review Essay: Theorizing Race, Theorizing Politics

Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America,

1945-2006, third edition, by Manning Marable. Jackson: University Press of

Mississippi, 2007. First edition published by Macmillan in 1984. 320 pp.

The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor, by Patricia J. Williams.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 272 pp.

The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, by Paul Gilroy. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1993, 280 pp.

Reviewed by: Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia Department of Politics,

Charlottesville, VA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917221128979

At the turn of the twenty-first century, few political theorists took racial

injustice as a primary area of inquiry. So few, in fact, that Heath Fogg Davis

rightly decried “the racial retreat of contemporary political theory” in a

Perspectives on Politics review essay.1 The gap between the preoccupations

1128979PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221128979Political TheoryBook Review

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