Dr. Juliet Hooker (University of Texas, Austin), “DuBois’ Afro-Futurism and Vasconcelos’ Indología”
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.
