G. Reginald Daniel

Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence

Racial Thinking in the United States is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. This useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement. This collection begins with an introduction to how Americans have thought about race, ethnicity, and colonialism. The first section of the book describes the founding of racial thinking in the United States along the racial binary of Black and White, and compares that system to the quite different system that developed in Jamaica. Section two describes anomalies in the racial binary, such as the experiences of people of mixed race, and of states such as Texas, California, and Hawaii, where large groups of non-Black and White racial groups co-exist. Part three analyzes five monoracial challenges to racial hierarchy.

Machado de Assis: From “Tragic Mulatto” to Human Tragicomedy

Drawing from Machado’s own statements as well as his prose fiction, G. Reginald Daniel provides an alternative interpretation of how Machado’s writings were inflected by his life—especially the experience of his racial identity. He argues that Machado endeavored to transcend, rather than deny, his racial background by embracing his greater humanity. Machado presents a challenge to the notion that the most important thing about one’s personhood is one’s community of descent. Daniel maintains that Machado sought to universalize the experience of racial ambiguity and duality regarding the mulatto condition in Brazil into a fundamental mode of human existence. Accordingly, the conception of the hybrid human subject erodes the very foundation of raciological thinking.