Overview

This book explores the politics of race, censuses, and citizenship, drawing on the complex history of questions about race in the U.S. and Brazilian censuses. It reconstructs the history of racial categorization in American and Brazilian censuses from each country s first census in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up through the 2000 census. It sharply challenges certain presumptions that guide scholarly and popular studies, notably that census bureaus are (or are designed to be) innocent bystanders in the arena of politics, and that racial data are innocuous demographic data. Using previously overlooked historical sources, the book demonstrates that counting by race has always been a fundamentally political process, shaping in important ways the experiences and meanings of citizenship. This counting has also helped to create and to further ideas about race itself. The author argues that far from being mere producers of racial statistics, American and Brazilian censuses have been the ultimate insiders with respect to racial politics.

Full Product Details

9780804740593

Table of Contents

Reviews

Nobles does an outstanding job of tracing major debates that have influenced the ways in which the census in both Brazil and the United States reflect racial understandings in their respective societies and in specific time periods. . . . Because this book is well written and documented, it would be an ideal book for a graduate seminar in critical race theory and international understandings of race and people of mixed descent. . . . This book is, overall, a welcome addition to studies of racial formation. -- Journal of American Ethnic History

Author Information

Melissa Nobles is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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