Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil

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Cambridge University Press, 1998 M10 28 - 390 pages
In this bold, original and persuasive book, Anthony W. Marx provocatively links the construction of nations to the construction of racial identity. Using a comparative historical approach, Marx analyzes the connection between race as a cultural and political category rooted in the history of slavery and colonialism, and the development of three nation states. He shows how each country's differing efforts to establish national unity and other institutional impediments have served, through the nation-building process and into their present systems of state power, to shape and often crystallize categories and divisions of race. Focusing on South Africa, Brazil and the United States, Marx illustrates and elucidates the historical dynamics and institutional relationships by which the construction of race and the development of these nations have informed one another. Deftly combining comparative history, political science and sociological interpretation, sharpened by over three-hundred interviews with key informants from each country, he follows this dialogue into the present to discuss recent political mobilization, popular protest and the current salience of race issues. Anthony W. Marx is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and has been a Visiting Professor at Yale University
 

Contents

Trajectories from Colonialism
29
Dutch and British Colonial Legacies
35
Comparative Overview
43
Lessons from Slavery
47
The Myth of Brazils Humanitarian Slavery
48
Slavery and Abolitionism in the United States
56
Comparing Slavery and Its Implications
62
The Uncertain Legacy of Miscegenation
65
AN OVERVIEW
178
Race Making from Below
191
We Are a Rock Black Racial Identity Mobilization and the New South Africa
194
Black Protest Forces Inclusive NationState Building
204
Burying Jim Crow Black Racial Identity Mobilization and Reform in the United States
217
Rising Black Protest Forces State Reforms
224
National Black Protest and White Backlash
234
The Movement Fractures
245

Implications
77
Racial Domination and the NationState
81
The Racial State
84
Ethnic Political Competition and Segregation
94
Apartheid and Greater White Unity
104
To Bind Up the Nations Wounds The United States after the Civil War
120
Segregation Party Competition and NationState Consolidation
131
Centralizing Power and Greater White Unity
145
Order and Progress Inclusive NationState Building in Brazil
158
Unity and Discrimination
159
The Persistent Myth of Racial Democracy
164
Breaching Brazils Pact of Silence
250
Constrained AfroBrazilian Solidarity under Racial Democracy
251
AfroBrazilian Activism Emerges
255
Comparative Overview
264
Conclusion
267
Unmaking Legal Racial Domination and the Continuing Legacies of Discrimination
269
General Implications
274
Notes
279
Bibliography
351
Index
381
Copyright

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Page 3 - All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

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