Micol Seigel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. xxii+386, £62.00, £15.99 pb.
up-to-date analysis and for the focus on concrete mechanisms of governance. The outstanding chapter for me is José Rabasa’s analysis of how indigenous representations – maps feature here, as do murals and photographs – can participate in both dominant, colonial language and concepts, and native ones. This leads neither to hybridity (a novel fusion) nor double consciousness (an alienated internal conflict). There is coexistence without contradiction, an idea that reminded me of Roger Bastide’s principe de coupure or principle of compartmentalisation, which he argued allowed Afro-Brazilians to participate in ‘modern’ Brazilian society and ‘ traditional ’ African religions with no sense of contradiction. Rabasa does not assume absence of conflict or opposition, however. On the contrary, a radical subalternity is maintained because apparently ‘modern ’ forms have been appropriated and resignified. Most of all, Rabasa has an excellent critique of the teleologies of modernity, which he says inevitably cast indigenous peoples – and indeed ‘peripheral ’ regions in general – as backward, secondary, marginal and perpetually awaiting modernisation. The refusal to see indigenous forms as pre-modern means that the coexistence of indigenous and dominant representations implies the coexistence of different logics or ontologies (although Rabasa does not use the word) that ‘ remain discreet though never pure in a plural-dwelling world ’ (p. 126). The fact that ‘ there are subalterns who do not find a contradiction between desiring, acquiring and mastering modern life forms and continuing to practice forms of life that have nothing to do with modernity ’ (p. 133) constitutes a radical form of alterity. Rabasa’s idea that subalterns do not have a DuBoisean double consciousness may be overly optimistic, but it does open up fresh possibilities for avoiding the insidious colonialism of modernity as a concept and a frame for thinking that tends, for example, to recast ‘ the global ’ and ‘ the local ’ as instances of modernity and tradition.