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WORK TITLE: The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy
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BIRTHDATE: 9/13/1959
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PERSONAL
Born September 13, 1959; married Zita Nunes (an English professor at the University of Maryland).
EDUCATION:Tufts University, B.A.; New School for Social Research, M.A.; Princeton University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, professor of Africana studies and department chair. Former professor of political science and African American studies, and direct of Institute for diasporic studies, Northwestern University.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
University of Pennsylvania professor of Africana studies Michael Hanchard, wrote the contributor of a biographical sketch to the University of Pennsylvania Department of Africana Studies Center for Africana Studies website, is “a scholar of comparative politics specializing in nationalism, social movements, racial hierarchy, and citizenship.” He is the author of the monographs Orpheus and Power: The ‘Movimento Negro’ of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought, and The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy.
Orpheus and Power
In Hanchard’s first book, Orpheus and Power, he looks at the ways in which race informs—or, rather, fails to inform—politics in Latin America (specifically Brazil). Race has long been a key factor in North American politics, and it continues to play a role in the relationship between, for instance, African Americans and law enforcement—something that Hanchard knows through personal experience after an encounter with a group of white bicyclists in Baltimore in 2001. “If we were a middle-aged white couple, rather than a black couple, and if the group of people who surrounded us were black or Latino, rather than white, would the attackers have been treated with impunity?,” Hanchard asked Dan Rodricks in an article appearing in the Baltimore Sun. “Would police officers have told a middle-aged white couple there was no way to determine whether they had been … assaulted?”
A the same time, however, race seems to play a quite different role in Brazilian society. “Race has not figured prominently within the work done on Latin America by political scientists. This is a gap that … Hanchard seeks to fill in Orpheus and Power. Quite appropriately, the central question Hanchard addresses is why no Afro-Brazilian social movement of national scope developed in Brazil in the post-World War II period. To answer this question the author adopts a Gramscian framework, which is favored on the basis of its ability to emphasize and grasp the cultural dimension of racial politics.”
Elements of Afro-Brazilian society are celebrated, and even borrowed, by white Latin Americans; the samba, for instance, became associated with singers and dancers like Carmen Miranda long before African-American culture became mainstream in the United States. “Hanchard’s starting point is how Afro-Brazilian culture is celebrated as the national culture in an otherwise racist society,” stated David Treece in Portuguese Studies. “He attempts an integrated examination of both sides of the problem: elite racial ideology, and the politics of its reception, assimilation or rejection by blacks in their experience as discriminated Afro-Brazilians.” “By focusing on the detail of specific people’s experiences and understanding of Brazil’s racial politics,” Treece continued, “he is able to explain how the ideological battle between dominance and subordination is waged as a continual tension within the contradictory consciousness of real individuals. This is crucial, given the absence of recent, historically decisive ‘moments’ of black resistance regionally or nationwide, as it undercuts the simplistic myth of a ‘smoothly maintained’ regime of black compliance or manipulation.” “Orpheus and Power is not a strictly historical account, nor does it aim to be,” declared Kim D. Butler in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. “Hanchard is a political scientist advancing a theory of racial hegemony that raises a host of possibilities for future research. His focus is on conceptual development, although some historians may prefer closer attention to empirical evidence…. However, the historiographical lacuna has too long inhibited the type of creative inquiry that Hanchard brings.”
Party/Politics and The Spectre of Race
Hanchard’s Party/Politics looks at the changing ways in which African American culture relates to American politics. “Party/Politics examines the idea of political community,” explained Patricia Hill Collins in Social Forces, “though not in ways that may be immediately apparent to students of political theory or philosophy. Rather, the core concern of Party/Politics is with sources of political imagination that inform various expressions of black politics. His play on the word ‘party’ is designed to signal this shift. Hanchard sees in this term the fusion of very different sensibilities concerning the meaning of politics.”
The Spectre of Race is a critique of the racist elements of Western democracy. The volume “explores the existence of nondemocratic institutions within at least nominally democratic societies,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “and the attempts [of the disenfranchised] … to gain political rights.” Hanchard points out that the material culture of classical Athens in the 5th century BCE, during the period it was a radical democracy, was based on slave labor. “Hanchard’s book offers a critique of the discipline of comparative politics, particularly its devotion to quantitative methods, and relative neglect of anthropological studies of particular cultures,” asserted Walter Clemens in the New York Journal of Books. “He also criticizes what he sees as the discipline’s failure to confront head-on the role of racism in polities around the world. ‘Neither colonialism nor neocolonialism by the world’s major powers has received much attention by scholars of historico-institutionalism in comparative politics. Is it mere coincidence that the most enduring democracies … are the polities that have benefited the most from the transatlantic slave trade? Did slavery … make democracy possible?’”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Political Science Review, December, 1994, Gerardo L. Munck, review of Orpheus and Power: The ‘Movimento Negro’ of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, 1945-1988, p. 1027.
Baltimore Sun, April 13, 2013, Dan Rodricks, “Man Sees Race, Indifference in Experience with Baltimore Police.”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, fall, 1996, Kim D. Butler, review of Orpheus and Power, p. 366.
Portuguese Studies, Volume 15, 1999, David Treece, review of Orpheus and Power, p. 216.
Publishers Weekly, April 23, 2018, review of The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy, p. 77.
Social Forces, June, 2008, Patricia Hill Collins, review of Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought, p. 1865.
ONLINE
Institute for Advanced Study website, https://www.ias.edu/ (August 29, 2018), author profile.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (August 29, 2018), Walter Clemens, review of The Spectre of Race.
University of Pennsylvania Department of Africana Studies Center for Africana Studies, https://africana.sas.upenn.edu/ (August 29, 2018), author profile.
Michael G. Hanchard is a professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Party/Politics and Orpheus and Power.
Man sees race, indifference in experience with Baltimore police
Michael Hanchard questions decision not to investigate street incident from 2011
Hopkins professor Michael Hanchard and his wife, Zita Nunes… (Lloyd Fox, Baltimore Sun )
April 13, 2013|Dan Rodricks
I don't know how to answer Michael Hanchard's questions, but I understand why he asks them: "If we were a middle-aged white couple, rather than a black couple, and if the group of people who surrounded us were black or Latino, rather than white, would the attackers have been treated with impunity?
"Would police officers have told a middle-aged white couple there was no way to determine whether they had been … assaulted?"
Before you go thinking that Michael Hanchard is a black man who plays the race card first and asks questions later, consider that the 53-year-old professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University waited a year to speak about this. He asked a lot of other questions — of police commanders and prosecutors, among others — before he got to the thorny ones about race and indifference.
This story goes back to 2 a.m. on Dec. 31, 2011. Hanchard and his wife, Zita Nunes, an English professor at the University of Maryland, were in their Volvo in downtown Baltimore, headed home to Roland Park after a pre-New Year's Eve party in Washington.
In an interview, and in court records and letters to the Baltimore police commissioner and state's attorney, Hanchard said he and his wife were harassed by a group of young adults on bicycles as they headed for a ramp to the Jones Falls Expressway. Hanchard says about 10 bicyclists surrounded his car and impeded his drive along North Gay Street. One of the bikers sat on his car at a stoplight.
When another repeatedly rammed the passenger side of the Volvo with the basket attached to his bike, Hanchard got out of the car and tried to push the rider away. He says the rider swung at him and missed; Hanchard swung back and landed a punch to the rider's face. Another person, Hanchard says, smashed the Volvo's windshield with a bicycle lock.
Hanchard and his wife both placed calls to 911. When the police arrived, several of the bicyclists were at the scene, including the one Hanchard had punched. Police conducted interviews, then decided not to file any charges.
Hanchard was shocked. He and his wife had called 911 three times. They believed they were the victims of a coordinated assault.
"It's your word against theirs," Hanchard heard one of the officers say.
"Police directed both parties to the court commissioner to seek charges, since the officer felt he had insufficient evidence to file a complaint," said Anthony Guglielmi, spokesman for the Baltimore police.
Hanchard did as instructed, securing a charge of malicious destruction of property against a 25-year-old Charles Village man, who later filed charges of his own, accusing Hanchard of assault.
In his court filings, and in a conversation with me, the Charles Village man, Henry Hinz, said he had been one of 20 to 30 bicyclists out for a ride when Hanchard's car struck him, sending him off his bike on Gay Street.
"After I got back on my bike and attempted to ride away," Hinz stated in court papers, "[Hanchard] got out of his car, chased me down and pulled me off my bicycle. When I attempted to stand, Michael Hanchard struck me in the face. Michael Hanchard is not the victim in this incident. He acted violently and aggressively."
Hanchard denies striking Hinz with his car.
When the cases got to court, Hinz was acquitted; the charge against Hanchard was dismissed because the prosecution was not ready to proceed on the trial date.
Hanchard was upset that the state's attorney's office pressed the assault charge against him, forcing the Hopkins professor to hire an attorney and defend himself in court.
But his main beef goes back to the morning of Dec. 31, 2011, and the white police officer who did not believe that Hanchard and his wife had been harassed and attacked by a group of young white adults on bicycles.
Would the police have investigated the incident as a crime had Hanchard been white and the bicyclists black?
After thinking about that for a year — and recalling the ugly political uproar last spring about "roving mobs of black youths" in downtown Baltimore — Hanchard suspects the answer to that is yes. The city's struggles with crime and lawlessness, he says, are still "compounded by the reality of a racial divide."
He takes something else away from his experience: profound concern about a "culture of indifference."
Back to the incident on Gay Street: I can see how busy cops might have viewed what happened there as a he said/he said dispute in the middle of the night, better left to a judge to settle in the light of day. But what police officers might consider sound, fair and quick decision-making in what they view as a minor incident can look like infuriating indifference to the taxpaying citizen, black or white, who calls for help.
drodricks@baltsun.com
Past Member
Michael Hanchard
Affiliation
Social Science
Field of Study
Political Science
From 9/2014 – 7/2015:
Utilizing previously neglected primary materials and sources, Michael Hanchard is tracing the specter of race in the study of comparative politics from the writings and institutional developments of Edward Augustus Freeman and Herbert Baxter Adams, the “movement” of comparative politics in the 1950s, to Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Dates at IAS
Member Social Science 9/2014–7/2015
Degrees
Princeton University
Ph.D., 1991
Michael Hanchard
Professor of Africana Studies
hanchard@sas.upenn.edu
Website
Michael Hanchard is a Professor of Africana Studies and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Political Science. Please visit his page on the Africana Studies website for more details.
Michael Hanchard
Professor of Africana Studies
Department Chair
Michael Hanchard is a Professor of Africana Studies. A scholar of comparative politics specializing in nationalism, social movements, racial hierarachy, and citizenship.
Hanchard taught previously ay Northwestern University, where he was a professor of political science and African American studies as well as director of the school's institute for Diasporic Studies. His books include Orpheus and Power: Afro-Brazilian Social Movements in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988 (1994) and Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (2006).
Hanchard has done fieldwork in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Cuba, Colombia, Ghana, Italy, and Jamaica, and has been the recipient of grants from the Ford, MacArthur, and Mellon foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Hanchard holds a BA in International Relations from Tufts University, an MA from the New School for Social Research, and a political science Ph.D. from Princeton University.
hanchard@sas.upenn.edu
Research Interests
Comparative Politics (Nationalism, Race and Ethnicity, Social Movements, Political Culture)
Africana Studies
Latin American Studies
Political Theory (Citizenship, Comparative Political Theory)
The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy
Publishers Weekly. 265.17 (Apr. 23, 2018): p77.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy
Michael G. Hanchard. Princeton Univ., $29.95
(272p) ISBN 978-0-691-17713-7
The geographic and temporal distance may be vast between ancient Athens and the civil rights era in the United States, but, according to this dense study by Johns Hopkins political scientist Hanchard, the former society's concept of autochthony--the limitation of political rights to native-born males--produced a "gendered ethnonational regime" comparable to numerous modern societies, including that of mid-20th-century America. Hanchard explores the existence of nondemocratic institutions within at least nominally democratic societies and the attempts of those excluded from full citizenship--whether on grounds of race, gender, age, or place of birth--to gain political rights. He also traces how the discipline of comparative politics developed and how the field's leading scholars incorporated into their research such events as global wars, decolonization, and liberation movements; Hanchard calls upon his fellow scholars to bring the historical legacies of imperialism and racism into their understanding of Western political philosophies. While the work is lucidly written--and Hanchard does a creditable job in highlighting seminal but little-known scholars, such as Edward Augustus Freeman, who in the late 19th century pioneered comparative analysis in the study of political history--this work is too dry in tone to reach a broad nonacademic audience. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy." Publishers Weekly, 23 Apr. 2018, p. 77. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532935/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=83738bfe. Accessed 27 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532935
Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought
Patricia Hill Collins
Social Forces. 86.4 (June 2008): p1865+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Oxford University Press
Full Text:
Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought
By Michael Hanchard
Oxford University Press, 2006. 324 pages. $35 cloth.
Michael Hanchard's Party/Politics examines the idea of political community, though not in ways that may be immediately apparent to students of political theory or philosophy. Rather, the core concern of Party/Politics is with sources of political imagination that inform various expressions of black politics. His play on the word "party" is designed to signal this shift. Hanchard sees in this term the fusion of very different sensibilities concerning the meaning of politics--that of the political "party" so revered within Western social science as well as the concept of "party" as festivity within popular culture.
Party/Politics's eight chapters discuss a range of themes and theoretical perspectives that engage the question, "what does contemporary political and social theory look like when viewed from a vantage point of a black life-world?" Part I's three chapters examine definitions and forms of politics. Chapter 2, titled "A Theory of Quotidian Politics," presents a provocative theorization of everyday politics that strives to account for the full range of political possibilities, from macro- and macro-level politics as well as strategies of acquiescence and resistance. The two chapters in Part II survey two disparate sites of politics, one a discussion of contemporary black intellectual production and the other a cultural studies-inflected exploration of fiction. The two concluding chapters cast a wider net by examining themes of black internationalism. Chapter 8 is an especially strong treatment of contemporary black politics, as Hanchard points out how transnational black political actors and organizations had to shift their focus away from the political objectives of the pervious era--apartheid and civil rights--toward matters of human rights, authoritarianism, AIDS and similar problems disproportionately affecting African and African-derived populations. He asks, what does this shift signal for black politics and black political thought?
Hanchard makes several important claims in this book. For one, he points out how, in various national societies, black politics first emerged in spheres of society not categorized as political. This claim enables him to explore how a history of black protest and resistance outside the formal spheres of Western politics underscores the manner in which the very definitions of political versus nonpolitical are themselves political constructs. For another, Hanchard argues that the realm commonly referred to as culture, specifically the arts and aesthetic practices as broadly defined in Western societies, is already suffused with the workings of the political. Challenging this assumption enables him to contest what he sees an analytical error in studies of politics and culture, namely, treating culture as a separate sphere from the political, rather than as a separate sphere from the state. Hanchard also claims that reconfiguring the relationship between politics and culture enables us to see how power dynamics and political communities determine how culture becomes political. Black culture provides an especially compelling site for studying this phenomenon.
Despite Party/Politics's ambitious goals, there is room for improvement. Although Hanchard presents a compelling theoretical argument about quotidian black politics early in the book, subsequent chapters fail to build upon and further develop the model. After such a heavy dose of wading through mainstream political theory as well as grappling with the complexity of Hanchard's model of quotidian politics, it is disconcerting to have these ideas seemingly vanish. Instead, it is left to the reader to make the myriad connections that I suspect Hanchard assumes that his readers will see through case studies and fiction. Yet the cases do not speak for themselves, and as a result, Party/Politics's chapters more closely resemble a loosely bundled discussion of related topics as opposed to a seamless argument that develops the theory of quotidian politics.
Another area for improvement concerns the treatment of the substance of black politics. Hanchard is clear about what this project is not: it is neither a history of political parties in the black world nor a history of black thinkers. Yet by the end of the volume, one would hope to see a more complex analysis of how Hanchard's claim to bring about a new horizon in black political thought illuminates key aspects of actual black politics. Instead, because Party/Politics does not develop the links between the substance of black political thought and how such links might illustrate and/or push his model of quotidian politics, the volume approaches yet never presents a fuller expression of a theory of black quotidian politics. In essence, one is left with much less meat about actual black politics than the types of theories about such politics circulated within academia.
Overall, in his efforts to unsettle the categories of the political in ways that brings a more robust understanding of black politics to the forefront, Hanchard does speak the truth to power, in this case, the political science establishment. I wish that he had spoken a comparable truth to those engaged in quotidian black politics.
Reviewer: Patricia Hill Collins, University of Maryland
Collins, Patricia Hill
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Collins, Patricia Hill. "Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought." Social Forces, vol. 86, no. 4, 2008, p. 1865+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A180217989/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cab1a774. Accessed 27 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A180217989
Orpheus and Power: the Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988
David Treece
Portuguese Studies. 15 (Annual 1999): p216+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1999 Modern Humanities Research Association
http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Journals/Portuguese.html
Full Text:
Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988. MICHAEL GEORGE HANCHARD. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. x+203 pp. Paperback 13.95 [pounds sterling].
The Social History of the Brazilian Samba. LISA SHAW. Aldershot, Brookfield: Ashgate, 1999. x+211 pp. 37.50 [pounds sterling].
The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil. HERMANO VIANNA. Ed. and trans. by JOHN CHARLES CHASTEEN. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xx+147 pp. Hardcover $34.95; paperback $15.95.
How, in a country where half the population suCers systematic discrimination on the grounds of race, has national-popular identity become synonymous with Afro-Brazilian identity? The three books reviewed here all shed important light on this central and enigmatic contradiction of life in twentieth-century Brazil. In all three, the relationship between culture and politics that is implied in the contradiction inevitably converges on the crucial period of the 1930s, when quintessentially black artistic practices such as samba started to be viewed as cultural capital by the State, as well as by the commercial recording market. Just as inevitably, in seeking to make sense of the shift in mentality that accompanied these developments, the influential figure of Gilberto Freyre looms into view. The materials and methodologies used by each author--the social anthropology of racial politics, in Hanchard's case, Shaw's analysis of the discourse of 1930s samba, and Vianna's cultural historical approach--lead to quite different conclusions, however, as to the significance and usefulness of Freyre's thinking half a century on.
The Mystery of Samba was first published in Brazil in 1995, and this English-language edition makes Vianna's important contribution to the scholarship on popular culture and nationalism usefully available to a wider readership. The 'mystery' Vianna attempts to unravel is a crucial one: how and why did samba, the repressed, marginalized music of an ethnically distinct community within Brazilian society, move to centre-stage, to become the official symbol of the national culture, the prime expression of mestico nationalism? Vianna's approach is to trace the re-invention of samba, not from some original, authentic 'source', but through a series of cultural mediations between the black musical community and the intellectual-political elite, from the mid-1920s through the following decade. Certainly his perspective is a healthy antidote to the purist nationalism or essentialism of those music critics and historians seeking to defend some sort of original, mythical 'authenticity' within the samba tradition, against the deleterious effects of external, 'alien' influences. The history of popular music, in Brazil as elsewhere, is in many respects a history of just such interactions between local and international, erudite and non-erudite traditions. I am not sure, though, that this need be defined as an especially 'postmodern' approach to the problem, as is argued in the preface by John Charles Chasteen, who has produced a lively, readable English translation of Vianna's text.
For Vianna, the key fulcrum of those mediations that produced the modern version of samba were the encounters within the dynamic musical scene of 1920s Rio de Janeiro, which brought together some of the city's more successful samba musicians, such as Pixinguinha and Sinho, and intellectuals such as Freyre and Modernists Blaise Cendrars, Villa-Lobos and Manuel Bandeira. Vianna rightly shows how such meetings had their parallels with earlier dialogues between composers of the songform known as modinha and the Romantic poets and intellectuals of the Empire, in the previous century. The evolution of popular music thereafter often hinged on the mediating role played by figures like the mulatto publisher Paula Brito, musicians Laurindo Rabelo and Catulo da Paixao Cearense and intellectual Afonso Arinos, who moved easily between the worlds of the elite and the povo. The most interesting material brought to light by Vianna's book concerns, on the one hand, the career of Pixinguinha's band the Oito Batutas, as it shifted between Rio's carnival parades, the Palais Theatre, official diplomatic functions and the Paris jazz scene; and, on the other hand, the mechanisms used by the Vargas State in the following decade to appropriate and shape samba as the definitive music of carnival. The more general discussion of Brazil's evolving nationalist ideology, the Modernist movement and mesticagem, while well recounted and obviously central to Vianna's argument, does not add anything to the familiar, standard literature on those topics. The preeminent role assigned to Freyre in the process which led to the nationalization of samba, as the cultural mediator par excellence of the transformation from 'black' to Afro-Brazilian, does beg some serious questions, however.
Vianna's declared intent is not to argue for or against Freyre's brand of mestico nationalism but to accept its impact on the national mentality as a fact of Brazil's cultural life. This is one thing; but to adopt Freyre's career as the structuring thread of his analysis, as he does, is quite another, for it means selecting Freyre's locus of mediation as the crucial one, and therefore inevitably presupposes an entire ideological agenda in his approach to the relationship between popular culture, ethnicity, and nationalism. In fact, despite the claim of impartiality, Vianna's sympathies are exposed on a number of occasions, as his efforts to be generous to Freyre clash awkwardly with the overtly reactionary content of Freyre's cited views. Acknowledging the danger that 'mesticagem always implies movement towards homogeneity that threatens to efface differences', he argues that, aware of that danger, Freyre defended 'the value of maintaining an optimum, rather than a maximum, level of diversity. The problem lies in determining that optimum level' (my italics). For whom, we might ask, is the level of cultural heterogeneity a problem, as if this were something that really needed to be determined? For Freyre, at least, there clearly was an acceptable limit to diversity, and it was reached when individuals or groups dared to challenge or disassociate themselves from the mythology of a 'racial democracy'. Commenting favourably on the poetry of mulatto Jorge de Lima, Freyre concluded: 'Fortunately, Brazil has no black poetry like that of the United States [...] always contracted into postures of attack or defense'.
Just as revealing is Vianna's rather lame advocacy of the theory of mesticagem, as one that liberally makes concessions to the principle of heterogeneity: 'the Freyrean concept of the Brazilian mestico retains, here and there, a trace of its constituent races (or cultures) despite being the center of a homogenizing project'. Again we might ask what constitutes a 'trace', and which kind is permissible. Vianna's citation from Freyre's Sobrados e Mocambos provides the answer, as he describes samba as 'rounded into something more Bahian than African', allowing performers such as [Carmen] Miranda to 'sublimate' and harness the brute 'energies' of Brazilian blacks'. As Michael Hanchard makes clear in Orpheus and Power, it is assimilationist, anti-Africanist views such as these which make Freyre's 'racial democracy' so undemocratic, and which led him to violent denunciations of the black movements of the 1970s and 1980s. This is why Vianna is so mistaken to equate Freyre the 'mediator' with other Latin American theorists of cultural interaction such as Fernando Ortiz or Nestor Garcia Canclini. The latters' concepts of transculturation and hybridity, respectively, seek to reflect the process of cultural interaction as complex, dynamic and incomplete, qualities that are suppressed or absorbed by Freyre's principle of mesticagem, whose function is to dissolve all expressions of anatagonism and difference.
If, as I believe is the case, Vianna does not ultimately arrive at an adequately satisfactory solution to the 'mystery of samba', it has a lot to do with the limitations imposed on his analysis by the Freyrean perspective. The corollary of privileging mediation, as the decisive principle in the process of cultural interaction, is to underplay or suppress, as Freyre does, the importance of struggle, the tension between appropriation and resistance in the dispute over cultural terrain. If mediation is a central feature of Brazil's social and cultural life, as it surely is, it is nevertheless not everything (to argue otherwise is to concur with a key plank of Brazil's nationalist ideology), indeed its ideological function becomes apparent precisely because of the (unresolved) frictions and conflicts that it seeks to smooth over. To present the nationalization of samba as the expression of an abstract, anonymous process of 'mediation' personified by an elite intellectual such as Freyre, runs the risk of denying any active agency to the makers of samba themselves.
It must be symptomatic in this regard that so little of the book actually discusses music or musicians, largely concentrating instead on intellectual and cultural history in general and theories of mesticagem in particular. Yet Brazil's black music was not just appropriated by a powerful, intelligent state apparatus, nor was its national popularity merely the result of its endorsement by certain key intellectuals. It surely also, at least in part, forced itself into the centre of the country's cultural life, as an expression of black Brazilians' struggle for economic and social space within the Republic. Vianna might do well to return to the quotation from samba chronicler Jota Efege, which he dismisses for explaining so little: 'the heroic epoch was like that, its people valiant, not letting themselves be intimidated, battered but unrelenting', ignoring 'the scorn of the bourgeoisie. [...] samba won the day in spite of everything. It formed its parading groups and astonished both countrymen and foreigners'. The black population's irrepressible invasion and reappropriation of public spaces previously denied to them following Abolition, and their repeated reinvention of samba by returning to its collective roots in the morro, are social and cultural facts which suggest an alternative history to the cordial mythology of mediation and homogenization, a history instead of contestation, creative refusal, and negotiation.
As Vianna says, his study emphasizes the 'external relations' of the sambistas' world, that is, the involvement of other forces in the invention of samba. In fact, the role of other non-ideological external forces such as the recording market and the media, specifically radio, as disseminating forces for samba at national level, is not properly addressed here. In any case, a key question ignored by Vianna is why it was samba and not some other musical form that was chosen as the symbol of Afro-Brazilian nationalism. In order both to explain this and to reclaim the neglected dimension of active agency in the history of samba's reinvention, one would need to examine its 'internal relations' too, that is to say, the aesthetic features of the music that might explain both its vigour and its adaptibility. For example, the fact that, although it was the carioca variety of samba that was 'nationalized', there was probably an African-derived substrate of rhythmic and performative structures already shared between carioca samba and other regional variants scattered across much of the country since the Colonial period, and which facilitated the recognition of samba as a 'national' tradition in the twentieth century. Furthermore, unlike most other song- or dance-forms of the period, samba was not just a style or genre but an entire set of philosophical and aesthetic structures (circle-dance, improvization, call-and-response, collective composition) integrating dance, song, instrumental music, and even religious celebration--a 'way of life' as many sambistas have often argued, capable of articulating the many dimensions of social existence.
If The Mystery of Samba fails to counterpose the active agency of black resistance to the efficacy of mediating ideologies such as Freyre's, that balance is achieved in Hanchard's Orpheus and Power. This should really be read in conjunction with Vianna's text, since amongst other things it takes a more rigorously critical look at the influence of Freyrean thinking in sustaining a racist mentality in Brazil and at the same time defusing efforts by the victims of racism to challenge it. While, like Vianna's, Hanchard's starting point is how Afro-Brazilian culture is celebrated as the national culture in an otherwise racist society, he attempts an integrated examination of both sides of the problem: elite racial ideology, and the politics of its reception, assimilation or rejection by blacks in their experience as discriminated Afro-Brazilians.
Readers should not be put off by some rather irritating and numerous editorial lapses, nor by Hanchard's turgidly academic style, which tends to depoliticize what actually is a very political book. His attempt to adapt the Gramscian concept of hegemony to racial politics, while it has some questionable implications, does have one important advantage--by focusing on the detail of specific people's experiences and understanding of Brazil's racial politics, he is able to explain how the ideological battle between dominance and subordination is waged as a continual tension within the contradictory consciousness of real individuals. This is crucial, given the absence of recent, historically decisive 'moments' of black resistance regionally or nationwide, as it undercuts the simplistic myth of a 'smoothly maintained' regime of black compliance or manipulation. On this basis, and using speeches, essays and extensive interviews with post-war black activists, Hanchard sets out to explain the relatively low level of racial self-identification amongst Brazilian blacks, and the black movement's limited success in mobilizing politically to achieve significant reforms.
As the first half of the book demonstrates, Brazil's long ideological tradition of 'racial exceptionalism' or 'racial democracy' does have a lot to answer for. The spurious claim made by nineteenth-century slaveowners, that the Brazilian plantation regime was benign by comparison with the US model, resurfaced in Gilberto Freyre's 1933 The Masters and the Slaves. Freyre's hugely influential argument was that the peculiar sociability of Portuguese and Africans fostered a domestic and sexual intimacy between the slaves and their owners, which dissolved the normally violent antagonisms of race and class in the aftermath of Abolition. The 'commonsense' evidence of widespread miscegenation 'confirmed' this lack of racial prejudice, the large mixed-race population blurring any clear demarcation along the black-white continuum. Brazil's diCerent racial character, then, was neatly translated into an outright denial of racism, and one of the key mechanisms in defusing or demobilizing black political initiatives has been what Hanchard calls 'pre-emptive sanctions' against anyone publicly challenging racism or asserting black autonomy. Prime examples recounted by Hanchard are Freyre's own denunciation of the 1970s Black Soul movement and the Unified Black Movement (MNU) of the 1980s as 'racist', and the state's repressive response to the alternative black commemorations of the Centenary of Abolition in 1988--all three phenomena make fascinating reading in Hanchard's account.
But just as serious for the black movement has been the history of accommodation to these ideas from within its own ranks, and the failure on the part of the traditional, Stalinist Left, and even the progressive Workers Party, both at the level of theory and praxis, to take contemporary mechanisms of racial oppression seriously, to see racism as anything more than a vestigial 'throwback' to slavery. No wonder, then, that in the general absence of a politics that could speak to the interests of half the country's population in terms both of class and race, the history of black organization has been marred by sectarianism and ideological incoherence. The one promising exception has been the MNU, formed in 1978 by a nucleus of black Trotskyists, and which has worked within a range of left-wing organizations, attempting to link black oppression to that of political prisoners, women, trade unionists, peasants, and gays.
The key stumbling block, as Hanchard sees it, has been the movement's 'culturalism', the celebration and mythification of black traditions of self-identification as a substitute for the business of direct political action, such as boycots, sit-ins, civil disobedience, or armed struggle. While this has undeniably been the case, Hanchard is wrong to argue that the movement should retreat from its identification with the history of black struggle and cultural self-affirmation elsewhere, that it should be 'less diasporic and more national'. What this means--and here Hanchard's reformist use of the Gramscian 'war of position' to describe Brazil's racial politics becomes clear--is that he has given up on the prospect of any wholesale challenge to the system that produces racism. All that is possible for the movement is to find ways 'to situate itself in national, public debate and bring further pressure to bear upon formal politicians and their institutions.'
Hanchard's evidence points to a different conclusion, though, which is that the national-popular mythology of racial democracy has been most sharply contested, as in the recent explosion of Brazilian rap, precisely when there has been an identification with other, international expressions of black resistance within the Diaspora. It is here that, instead of being turned into myth, cultural traditions can reclaim their living historical content as forms of refusal capable of intervening ideologically and materially in the present, and thus of overflowing into political practice.
Hanchard argues for the need to bring a cultural dimension to bear on the politics of race, to integrate an analysis of culture with an analysis of the structures of power. In fact, his understanding of the interactions between culture and racial politics is probably the weakest aspect of the book, and he certainly does not do justice to the interrelationship between State and culture in the crucial post-1930 period. This is where Lisa Shaw's The Social History of the Brazilian Samba comes into its own, filling in many of the gaps left by Vianna and Hanchard at the level of cultural production itself, as a conscious, creative intervention in the construction of national and popular identities. The first three chapters very helpfully situate samba and its thematic concerns within the dramatically changing social and political context of the Vargas era, relating them to Getulio's policies towards popular culture, the twin mechanisms of cultural promotion and censorship, the crucial role of the recording industry and particularly of the radio in the professionalization and dissemination of the modern samba tradition. Combined with her detailed and genuinely enlightening textual analysis of the work of three key sambistas from the period, that should make this, one of the first of Ashgate's new Studies in Ethnomusicology, a valuable textbook for students of popular song and Brazilian cultural history in general, alongside that of Vianna.
The chief contribution of Shaw's book to the debate engaged in by Vianna, Hanchard and others, is to provide evidence of a different kind; to reveal, in her vivid portrayal of the work of three very different songwriters, precisely how actual composers constructed and reformulated the samba tradition in that crucial decade of the 1930s; and how samba has expressed not just the smooth functioning of cultural mediation, but also the contestation of identities, the contradictions between national and popular, and between national-popular and black identities. This is a kind of complexity that is only arrived at by working at the level of language rather than generality (the book also includes a useful glossary of terms from the world of popular music and popular culture), which enables us to understand how the crucial icons and myths of popular and ethnic identity operate 'from the inside', as it were. The shifting musical representation of the malandro/a and mulata (inexplicably ignored by both Vianna and Hanchard), for example, with its dialectic of consent and contestation, speaks volumes about the contradictions of social and economic 'integration' for blacks under the Vargas regime, as a shifting labour market meant the absorption of some blacks into the workforce, but only limited social mobility or none at all for most.
As Shaw demonstrates, those contradictions run right through the songwriting and professional history of black, working-class sambista Ataulfo Alves, in his struggle for respectability; from sometime malandro finding success first in the escolas de samba and later in the recording industry, to best-dressed, dapper ambassador of samba, with aspirations to literary erudition. For Shaw, the tension in Alves's writing, his awareness of the restraints of stylistic convention, of the dangers of treading the thin line between elegance and banality, and the clash of linguistic registers that is often the outcome, expresses the ambiguity of the genre in the 1930s. '[C]aught somewhere between a form of grass-roots popular culture and commercially viable commodity', samba was neither any longer 'the pure, untainted preserve of poor Afro-Brazilians' nor 'an entirely democratized commodity for mass consumption'. As such, it was a reminder of the socio-cultural gap which mesticagem and the myth of racial democracy had not abolished and could not.
The white middle-class getulista Ary Barroso might seem the most obvious candidate for Vianna's thesis, a commercial success of the radio and showbusiness industries, close to the donos do poder and epitomizing the triumph of samba as the celebration of Afro-Brazilian nationalism. But in fact his work just goes to illustrate where Freyre's homogenizing treatment of Afro-Brazilian cultural identity leads. In Barroso's hands the vernacular edge of popular language is diluted and stylized, becoming an instrument for systematically folklorizing popular life as idyllic and problem-free. His eulogistic, nationalist samba-exaltacao 'Aquarela do Brasil', Brazil's 'second national anthem', used tautological hyperbole and cliche to transform the baiana and mulata into icons of folklorized mestico nationalism for easy, uncritical consumption. Afro-Brazilian identities are incorporated not as living, contemporary actors, but as anonymous 'colour' for the national landscape, as Shaw puts it, 'in the sentimentalized context of the colonial plantation, where they can exist as quaint, side-show curiosities, frozen in time'.
Similarly, one might be tempted to view the 'philosopher of samba', Noel Rosa, as the model of Vianna's ideal of mediation, moving between the red-light quarters and working-class districts of Lapa and the Zona Norte, and the socially, ethnically, and culturally heterogeneous population of the Vila Isabel neighbourhood. But for all Rosa's eulogies of the mulata do morro, this is hardly a complacent, mythologized nationalism. Instead, in Rosa's depiction of everyday popular experience (such as in 'Coisas Nossas'), carioca lowlife is often critically counterposed to the official idea of nationalistic optimism, the unglamorous morro is contrasted with the cidade, and the would-be malandro is quite capable of demystifying and critiquing the myth of the malandro himself. Rosa's creative manipulation of rhyme, unlike that of Alves or Barroso, becomes a way of commenting critically on convention, of making scathing, irreverent sideswipes at facile notions of nationalism that disguise the grim reality of life under Vargas. The popular is defined as such not because it is a homogenized, mestico blend of cultural differences but because it is life as lived by the majority, the real alternative to the official mythologies of national life. In Shaw's words: 'the mundane is not glamorized or idealized from a position of social or intellectual distance, but is portrayed with objectivity'. Rosa never relinquishes his critical perspective, the very feature of the samba tradition that has always prevented its complete absorption into the national-popular project. Which is just as well, as it is this permanent right to criticism that Brazilians are invited to suspend when they accept Freyre's complacent brand of mestico nationalism.
DAVID TREECE
KING'S COLLEGE LONDON
Treece, David
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Treece, David. "Orpheus and Power: the Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988." Portuguese Studies, vol. 15, 1999, p. 216+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A122875135/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=35cde80e. Accessed 27 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A122875135
Orpheus and Power: The "Movimento Negro" of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988
Kim D. Butler
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 27.2 (Fall 1996): p366+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/
Full Text:
Orpheus and Power is a provocative text that proposes to interpret the emergence of an Afro-Brazilian "black movement" (movimento negro) between 1945 and 1988 within an analytical framework adapted from Gramsci's theory of hegemony.(1) Despite a veneer of racial harmony and democracy, Afro-Brazilians have faced persisting constraints on social, economic, and political mobility since abolition in 1888. Hanchard grapples with the conundrum that has puzzled many a North American observer - "the inability of many Brazilian citizens to identify problems of race at all, and the lack of recognition that particular problems of racial discrimination, violence, and inequality exist in Brazil" (47). The second half of his chapter on racial democracy cogently explains the modes by which the peculiarly Brazilian variant of racial hegemony is maintained. Hanchard goes on to document the maturation of the movement, tracing understudied developments such as the phenomenon of "Black Soul," and internal debates between "Americanists" and "Africanists." These are valuable contributions that merit the attention of all scholars of twentieth-century, Afro-Brazilian history.
Orpheus and Power is not a strictly historical account, nor does it aim to be. Hanchard is a political scientist advancing a theory of racial hegemony that raises a host of possibilities for future research. His focus is on conceptual development, although some historians may prefer closer attention to empirical evidence. There are instances in which greater specificity and detail are necessary to support such conclusions as his characterization of the newly created negro identity unifying blacks and mulattos as "apolitical," or his notion that "the fundamental issue-problem for the movimento has been the backward glance, the gaze toward a monolithic, unitary Africa as a basis for collective identity, ideology, and action" (79, 164) This empirical specificity is sometimes difficult, due to the notorious scarcity of sources for a comprehensive social history on which innovative theorists can base their work. However, the historiographical lacuna has too long inhibited the type of creative inquiry that Hanchard brings.
Historians will find Hanchard's discussion of the movement after the 1970s more satisfying in its sources, many of them previously untapped. Working from interviews and personal observations, he identifies the salient struggles within a movement striving for political influence and mass support, providing fascinating points of departure for future exploration. Why has the "movement" always represented a minority of Afro-Brazilians, especially its activist core? Why have Afro-Brazilians offered only minimal support to activist organizations, yet poured huge sums into religious institutions and carnival associations?
Herein lies one of Hanchard's most engaging debates, that about the meanings and uses of culture. Hanchard rightly recognizes the elite's ability to appropriate culture and denude it of its political potential, as well as the the black leadership's failure to harness that potential. The question is, Where does one draw the line between culturalist (apolitical) and explicitly political manifestations? Hanchard, who interviewed key activists, tends to gravitate toward their frustration with the proclivity of Afro-Brazilians to participate in cultural, rather than political, activity. Yet, throughout the twentieth century, Afro-Brazilians have used culture to reshape their identities, thereby enabling them to find commonality not only with Africans but also with "blacks" and "browns," as well as with people of African descent elsewhere in the diaspora. The importance of thousands of young Afro-Brazilians at a Black Soul dance, wearing Afros and watching images of United States black protest movements, cannot be overestimated. Perhaps it is necessary to broaden the definition of the political to include other mobilizations of Afro-Brazilians that contain clues to their struggle for self-determination and representation in the society at large. In so doing, it is possible to recast the apparent lack of political consciousness as a vibrant struggle of self-determination in which the politics of identity take center stage.
Orpheus and Power does not propose to be a definitive text but, rather, to generate new debates and methodological approaches to Afro-Brazilian political history. In that mission, it succeeds admirably. Hanchard offers a host of imaginative theoretical possibilities that brings a new and welcome vigor to Afro-Brazilian studies.
Kim D. Butler Rutgers University
1 See, for example, Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (eds. and trans.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York, 1971); Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci's Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley, 1980).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Butler, Kim D. "Orpheus and Power: The 'Movimento Negro' of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988." The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 27, no. 2, 1996, p. 366+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A18825231/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5dbdbe7d. Accessed 27 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18825231
Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, 1945-1988
Gerardo L. Munck
American Political Science Review. 88.4 (Dec. 1994): p1027+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Cambridge University Press
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While long a staple in discussions among political scientists working on the United States, race has not figured prominently within the work done on Latin America by political scientists. This is a gap that Michael George Hanchard seeks to fill in Orpheus and Power. Quite appropriately, the central question Hanchard addresses is why no Afro-Brazilian social movement of national scope developed in Brazil in the post-World War II period. To answer this question the author adopts a Gramscian framework, which is favored on the basis of its ability to emphasize and grasp the cultural dimension of racial politics. After introducing the book's conceptual framework and presenting an overview of the debate on Brazilian racial politics in Chapters 1 and 2, the author starts to present his argument. The lack of a social movement among Afro-Brazilians, Hanchard states, is due to the "racial hegemony" embodied in the ideology of Brazilian "racial democracy" that began to take root in the early part of the nineteenth century. Racial hegemony, by promoting "discrimination while simultaneously denying its existence" effectively neutralized racial identification among Afro-Brazilians and made mass mobilization unlikely.
To develop this argument the author first traces, in chapter 3, the origins of the notion of racial democracy, turning primarily to the writings of authors such as Gilberto Freyre. In the next three chapters more empirically-oriented material is presented. The author draws upon archival material and interviews, particularly with activists from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Because of the lack of any phenomenon that could be called a social movement of national scope, this book lacks the unifying focus the civil rights movement, for example, provides U.S.-based studies on race. Instead, a variety of incidents from everyday life, as well as the potentially most consequential manifestations of Black identity, are considered. The material is cogently presented and the story persuasively developed. The author shows how the vision of racial democracy impeded recognition of racially specific problems, which in turn undermined group solidarity around race and race-based mobilization of national scope.
This accomplishment notwithstanding, there remain many loose ends of a conceptual nature in this book. Hanchard may be right in stating that hegemony is a useful concept in that it allows one to grasp the cultural dimension of racial politics. Group identity, indeed, can be thought of as a precondition for collective action. But, as the author himself acknowledges, "the collective identification with a particular group or collectivity is an insufficient basis for political mobilization". A theory of collective action, in other words, involves more than the issue of collective identity. Recognizing this point, the author points to the need to look beyond the cultural dimension of racial politics and to consider a "broader social totality" and see "cultural practices" as "part of whole social processes--at once ideological, cultural and material". Unfortunately, this sort of cryptic comment, never really spelled out and clarified, does little to shed light on a complex conceptual problem. The link between group identity and collective action thus remains untheorized.
What is most glaringly absent is a concerted effort to consider the link between national politics and potential social movements. In other words, there is no sustained attempt to consider the strategic dilemmas presented for incipient social movements by different patterns of national politics, a factor closely linked to the likelihood of social movements being formed. To be fair, reference is made to actions being "informed" or not by the "new logic of the abertura," that is, the political opening whereby Brazil moved from military rule to democracy starting in the mid- to late-1970s. But such comments are made only in passing and do not form part of a theoretically guided consideration. There is simply no attempt to review and draw upon the insights that the voluminous works on transitions from authoritarian rule and democratic consolidation have produced and to consider how they could be incorporated into the study of race relations.
The main theoretical problem of Orpheus and Power, then, is that it focuses primarily on cultural politics. If institutional politics is of little importance to the study of race relations because, as Hanchard states, "much of Brazilian racial politics occurs outside of channels of representative democracy," this is something to be considered and assessed. And such an assessment can only be made if institutional politics is not brought in in an ad hoc fashion but as part of a conceptual framework that seriously addresses this dimension of politics. While this may be a theoretically challenging enterprise, there certainly is no good argument for the a priori rejection of the insight developed in various bodies of literature that stress how political institutions play a role in defining how groups become structured and relate to one another.
Such a theoretical critique does not mean that we must start from scratch, because this line of thinking is developed within the recent theoretical literature on social movements. Indeed, this body of literature, developed by sociologists as well as political scientists such as Sidney Tarrow, has clearly emphasized the need to conceptualize the linkage between national politics and the strategic choices faced by potential social movements. This literature, then, seems to be the natural frame of reference for a study that purports to analyze social movements in Brazil. But the entire body of literature on social movements is summarily dismissed. The problem for Hanchard is not that he is opposed to cross-disciplinary work, as his advocacy of a "political-anthropological" approach indicates. Hanchard's rejection of social movement theory, rather, is based on the lack of attention in this literature to the specific problem of race. This depiction of the social movement literature is accurate, to a certain extent, but to fully reject the relevance of social movement theory to race-based social movements entails a fundamental error: to assume what must be shown. If racially based social movements operate in a different manner than gender based or ecological social movements, this is something to be established through a general theory of social movements. In other words, the distinction between race and gender, or race and ethnicity, is something to be established through theoretically guided work, not through pre-theoretical assertions. Until this has been done, there is no reason not to see different social movements as sharing some basic characteristics inasmuch as they all seek to challenge the status quo.
Because of these shortcomings, this reviewer would characterize Hanchard's effort to fill the race gap in political science work on Latin America as one that meets only mixed success. If Hanchard rightly points out that Alfred Stepan's (1989) edited volume Democratizing Brazil could be blamed for not touching upon the impact of race on the process of democratization, his own work in effect replicates the mistakes of those he criticizes and does nothing to build bridges between mainstream political concerns and the study of race relations. In some sense, then, we are back where we started: rather than a Latin American-based political science that ignores race we are given a study that focuses on race to the exclusion of the dynamics of democratization. This failure to engage the work done by political scientists on the regional move toward democracy is not fatal, but it does limit the likely impact of Orpheus and Power. Most damagingly, it is unlikely that it will affect the democratization debate to any great extent. Its significance, then, will be restricted to its contribution to the debate on Brazilian race relations and the comparative study of race relations. In this sense, Hanchard provides a worthwhile addition to the revisionist historiography that has questioned and sought to dispel the image held in the literature for some time that Brazil was a racial democracy. Countering this image, the author shows how the notion of racial democracy has prevented the politicization of racial issues and a frontal attack on the problem of racial discrimination.
GERARDO L. MUNCK University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Munck, Gerardo L. "Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, 1945-1988." American Political Science Review, vol. 88, no. 4, 1994, p. 1027+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A16531162/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4cab6ac9. Accessed 27 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A16531162
The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy
Author(s):
Michael George Hanchard
Release Date:
May 22, 2018
Publisher/Imprint:
Princeton University Press
Pages:
280
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Walter Clemens
Was classical Athens a democracy? If not, do some of its undemocratic ways continue to shape so-called democracies in the 21st century? Hanchard tackles these questions head on and believes that his answers help explain nativist populism in today’s Europe and United States.
Hanchard is a professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His story is anchored in ancient Athens, where a majority of residents could not vote. Before the fifth century Greco-Persian wars, foreign residents (metics) and women could not vote but were allowed to participate in formal public rituals.
After the fifth century wars with Persia, autochtony became a requirement for citizenship. Based on a myth, autochtony held that citizens could only be male descendants of original Athenian males who literally sprang from the earth. (Some Native Americans still believe that their ancestors came out of the earth—not from Siberia.) Civic rights for metics and Athenian women were tightened after the Persian wars, but slaves had none. Slavery, its proponents argued, made democracy possible. Citizenship was a gendered ethno-national regime.
Autochtony, designed to limit membership in the Athenian polity, became a prototype for limiting citizenship in modern Western polities. In ancient Athens, as in modern political communities, groups of people were excluded from political participation through law, normative reprobation, and coercion. Democracy coexisted and now coexists with anti-democracy. The ability to own property and to access wealth, education, and suffrage have their origin in laws and customs that have privileged males in most societies. Social and economic inequality have origins in political inequality.
The concept of race became the modern equivalent of the Athenian myth of autocthony in many Western states. But the race concept was “portable”—it grew detached from territory to denote populations regardless of their location. Populations showed their alleged racial characteristics wherever they appeared. Allegedly superior races such as the Teutonic were said to be predestined to rule whether in Germany or Africa. As Hannah Arendt noted, this kind of racism cuts across national boundaries. Western governments have devised racial and ethno-national regimes that used immigration controls, literacy, birth, and wealth to limit access to political life.
The 19th century study of comparative politics marshaled evidence that racial and national hierarchy is central to modern politics. Thus, Oxford historian Edward Augustus Freeman in 1873 argued that the idea of race has been central to politics from the ancient polis to the more recent conjuncture of nation and state. Similar views were evident in the scholarship and political recommendations of Princeton professor Woodrow Wilson. Non-Teutonic peoples were judged to be inferior and less able to form a successful polity. Given Wilson’s evident racism, people now debate whether to strip his name from institutions in Washington and New Jersey.
Hanchard’s book offers a critique of the discipline of comparative politics, particularly its devotion to quantitative methods, and relative neglect of anthropological studies of particular cultures. He also criticizes what he sees as the discipline’s failure to confront head-on the role of racism in polities around the world.
“Neither colonialism nor neocolonialism by the world’s major powers has received much attention by scholars of historico-institutionalism in comparative politics. Is it mere coincidence that the most enduring democracies . . . are the polities that have benefited the most from the transatlantic slave trade? Did slavery, specifically racial slavery, provide the necessary material largesse to make democracy possible?”
The Spectre of Race contains information relevant to every alert citizen, such as Americans debating whether stronger measures are needed to counter voter fraud and whether police should wear body cameras to document their interactions with suspected criminals. As Hanchard writes: “Our contemporary moment is that population homogeneity, like the category of foreigner and citizen, is a political artifact.”
As in ancient Athens, today’s nationalistic and xenophobic movements emphasize origins along with skin color, religion, and other traits to distinguish citizen from non-citizen. To achieve homogeneity, some officials and publics would resort to exclusion or removal of outsiders, as happens in today’s Myanmar. A postscript entitled “From Athens to Charlottesville” carries the story into the populist identity politics of the Trump era.
However, this book is written for social science professionals and should pressure them to think again about their approaches to comparative politics and democracy. The last chapter on restructuring comparative politics evaluates the writings of many anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists such as Samuel Huntington. The book’s appendices provide a virtual encyclopedia of information on political prohibitions on people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1805–1900; details of the discriminatory laws; and more recent affirmative action legislation in Brazil and six other Latin countries to undo this heritage.
Concerned citizens as well as specialists should read or re-read Black Reconstruction by W. E. B. Du Bois (1935), and quoted by Hanchard. Du Bois advanced arguments similar to Hanchard’s but with less theory and more down-to-earth language: “The true significance of slavery in the United States to the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate relation of slaves to democracy.”
Walter Clemens is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston University. He is the author of more than 20 books, most recently North Korea and the World: Human Rights, Arms Control, and Strategies for Negotiation. His many articles on both domestic and international affairs have appeared in scholarly journals as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers in various countries.