Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash

(Hardback)

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Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas is an essential roadmap to understanding contemporary racial politics across the Americas, where openly white supremacist politics are on the rise. It is the product of a multiyear, transnational research project by the Anti-racist Research and Action Network of the Americas in collaboration with resistance movements confronting racial retrenchment in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States. How did we get here And what anti-racist strategies are equal to the dire task of confronting resurgent racism This volume provides powerful answers to these pressing questions. 1) It traces the making and contestation of state-led racial projects in response to black and indigenous mobilization during an era of expansion of multicultural rights in the context of neoliberal capitalism. 2) It identifies the origins and manifestations of the backlash against hard-fought (but hardly far-reaching) gains by marginalized peoples, showing that (contrary to critiques of identity politics) the losses and anxieties produced by the failures of neoliberalism have been understood in racial terms. 3) It distills a path forward for progressive anti-racist activism in the Americas that looks beyond state-centered, rights-seeking strategies and instead situates a critique of racial capitalism as central to the contestation of white supremacy.

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Fired by the active collaboration of Black and Indigenous scholars and activists, this book is an essential reference point for the understanding of racism and anti-racism in the Americas. Its central claim about the emergence of a new variant of racial capitalism, combining re-energized racism and post-racialism, is powerful, original and agenda-setting. The book provides key conceptual tools for both understanding and challenging this new and insidious project of racial retrenchment. -- Peter Wade, University of Manchester, coeditor of Cultures of anti-racism in Latin America and the Caribbean

Author Bio

Juliet Hooker is professor of political science at Brown University.