Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

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 Why and how has race become a central aspect of politics during this century? This book addresses this pressing question by comparing South African apartheid and resistance to it, the United States Jim Crow law and protests against it, and the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. Anthony Marx argues that these divergent experiences had roots in the history of slavery, colonialism, miscegenation and culture, but were fundamentally shaped by impediments and efforts to build national unity. In South Africa and the United States, ethnic or regional conflicts among whites were resolved by unifying whites and excluding blacks, while Brazil's longer established national unity required no such legal racial crutch. Race was thus central to projects of nation-building, and nationalism shaped uses of race. Professor Marx extends this argument to explain popular protest and the current salience of issues of race.--Publisher description. Ideas, policies, conflicts about race and images of nationalism have been major themes of politics for more than a century. This book illuminates the particular experiences of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil, but also uses comparisons to reveal patterns and linkages between race, nation, state and class dynamics not otherwise apparent. Offers a comparative look at the historical, political, ethnic, and socialogical interpretations of three countries--Brazil, South Africa, and United States--in an effort to demonstrate how national bonds and cultural connections are formed. UP. PRIOR PRACTICES AND BELIEFS set the context in which post-abolition and post-colonial racial order was constructed.