Reviews for Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World

The average rating for Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean and the World based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-09-14 00:00:00 Harlan Arnold Apocryphally, an aspiring composer once sent his work to an elder of the craft, hoping for approval. "Your music is both original and beautiful," came the reply, "but, unfortunately, the parts that are beautiful are not original, and the parts that are original are not beautiful." Dr. Alleyne's work is both theoretically interesting and factually well-documented, but the parts that theoretically interesting are not factually well-documented and the parts that are factually well-documented are not are not theoretically interesting. The theoretical first half presents an admirably provocative thesis - that, contrary to the opinion of the vast majority of contemporary historians of the relevant material, racism was not born out of slavery and the colonial encounter, but has much deeper roots stretching into classical antiquity. (Azar Gat argues for something similar in "Nations," although as I have not yet read that work, I canot say to what extent it succeeds.) Unfortunately, he has little evidence to offer for this other than the philological, and the fact that phenotypically distinct foreigners (how often? how representative?) were often regarded as aesthetically displeasing. (Specious argument from etymology may be forgivable if you can write as well as Nietzsche, but not if you do so as dryly as Alleyne.) Citation is used sparingly, I recognized a number of strictly factual inaccuracies (that the Chinese never dominated any sort of world-system, that Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews are defined confessionally...,) and the text is full of "we can reasonably assume"s and "surely we can concludes"s and other such saltations. He does not seem to be familiar with the historicist arguments in great detail. Although he receives points for honesty in pointing out in the introduction that this area is beyond his training as a linguist, he does not appear to have surmounted the additional obstacles which this imposes. The second half of the book is somewhat comprehensive-seeming delineation of how perceived racial categories exist and are being reconstructed in Puerto Rico, Martinique, and Jamaica. The theoretical relationship with the first half of the book is unclear, to the extent that it has a theoretical claim running through it it depends on an uncritical acceptance of British slavery as more harshly racist than the Continental varieties. This is not an unsupportable position, but it is no longer historiographically uncontroversial, and Alleyne shows no signs of familiarity with the literature. Overall, it amounts to something Baconian, and while many of the individual facts (to the extent they can be trusted?) are interesting, I'm left wondering why I should care. Since I /started/ very interested in this subject, I find it difficult to come up with a more denigrating summary of it than that.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-09-24 00:00:00 Mark Gall In many ways, this monograph is a terrible book even though it contains a great deal of useful information. Teasing out that information is damnably difficult,not least because Kidd does not present a properly organized narrative. Furthermore, he tries to bring far too much under the rubric of Protestantism--so wide an umbrella as to render the term useless. Sorry, Nation of Islam may have been influenced by American Protestantism, but it is manifestly NOT Protestantism. There are also points at which he conflates Protestantism with all of Christianity, which doesn't work either. He is correct in his assessment that Protestantism with its insistence on sola scripture, sola fidism, and priesthood of all believers ties itself up in knots over the issue of race (as defined by skin color); he is also correct that race is, from a biological standpoint, utter nonsense. What he tries and fails to do is chart a course of how we get from the beginnings of Protestantism to the current crop of right-wing racist & racialist nut jobs (without, of course, defining racist and racialist). And here's the worst part--his argument is so clearly teleological as to drive a reader insane. Nothing is inevitable, and nothing is a linear progression when discussing human history, nature, arrogance, and/or delusion.