Juliet Hooker — 2018 Ralph J. Bunche Award Recipient

The American Political Science Association (APSA) will present the Ralph J. Bunche Award to Dr. Juliet Hooker at the 2018 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition, the world’s largest gathering of political scientists and source for emerging scholarship in the discipline. The $1,000 award recognizes the best scholarly work exploring the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

Juliet Hooker is a Professor of Political Science at Brown University. She is a political theorist specializing in multiculturalism, racial justice, Latin American political thought, Black political thought, and Afro-descendant and indigenous politics in Latin America. Her publications include Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford, 2017)—which was a recipient of the 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award from the American Political Science Association—and Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford, 2009). Her most recent publication is “Black Protest/White Grievance: On the Problem of White Political Imaginations Not Shaped by Loss,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, vol. 3 (2017), which was part of a special issue she co-edited on “After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore: The Challenge of Black Death and Black Life for Black Political Thought.” Prof. Hooker served as co-Chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015), and as Associate Director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (2009-2014). She has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the DuBois Institute for African American Research at Harvard, and the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

The winners of the Ralph Bunche Award are two outstanding and field-defining books, Juliet Hooker’s Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford University Press) and Chris Zepeda- Millán’s  Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge University Press).

Juliet Hooker’s beautifully written, theoretically rich, and methodologically innovative book examines some of the most important thinkers on race in the Americas. She makes a strong case for what she calls “hemispheric juxtaposition” through a painstaking, nuanced comparison of the works of Frederick Douglass and Domingo F. Sarmiento and W.E.B. Du Bois and José Vasconcelos, whose works are tied together through their responses to scientific discourses about race and their “dialogically formed racial discourses and political projects” conceived in relation to the “other” America. The book redefines “American Studies” and has far-reaching implications not only for how we might read Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, but also for our understanding of how ideas about race, imperialism, and liberation travel across time and space. This groundbreaking work will further shape debates on the epistemological foundations of comparative political theory and set the benchmark for transnational studies of race.