Dr. Juliet Hooker: DuBois’ Afro-Futurism and Vasconcelos’ Indología

Dr. Juliet Hooker, Professor of Government and African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, and author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity talks on Race in Latin and Latino America.The ideas about race formulated by the Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos [1882-1959] and the African American thinker W. E. B. DuBois [1868-1963] are often said to be exemplary of the distinct and opposed approaches to racial identity and racial mixing characteristic of U.S. African-American and Latin American and political thought. In this talk I focus on two rarely discussed texts by these thinkers: DuBois’ only novel, Dark Princess (1928), an interracial romance that imagines a political alliance of people of color worldwide, and Vasconcelos’ Indologia (1927), in which his arguments about Latin American identity (later synthesized in The Cosmic Race) were initially developed. I compare the anti-colonial impulses that animate both texts, and consider the insights gleaned by reading DuBois’ text through the lens of Afro-futurism, especially in relation to Latin American Indigenismo.