Race in translation: Culture wars around the postcolonial Atlantic

Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic is at once a report from various fronts in the race/colonial debates, a mapping of the germane literature in several languages, and an argument about the politics of the cross-border flow of ideas. Against the backdrop of an Atlantic space shaped by the conquest of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and massive colonial and postcolonial dislocations, our book visits key ports along an oceanic continuum. We follow the transatlantic traffic of "race" within and between three national zones: the United States (and more broadly the Anglophone zone), France (and the Francophone zone), and Brazil (and the Lusophone zone). Our study goes beyond the three zones, however, in that it continually asserts the cultural presence of multiple geographies, while inscribing the race/coloniality problematic in the Atlantic generally. The various itineraries of the race debates, we argue, intersect in some surprising and illuminating ways.