DAVID LUIS-BROWN:  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 

David-Luis Brown's meticulously researched Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race And Hemispheric Citizenship in the United States contributes much to the nascent but growing field of transnational and hemispheric studies. In this project, the author has produced an astute and imaginative analysis of interrelated, radical early twentieth-century Latin American and North American authors, texts, and movements. The book's scope and focus are ambitious and inventive. Indeed, the author posits crucial, substantive questions, employing a comparative interdisciplinary methodology with far-reaching implications. In doing so, his study advances and contributes to the continuing transformation of American Studies.

In this comprehensive study, Luis-Brown argues that intellectuals and revolutionaries in the U.S., Cuba, Mexico, and elsewhere forged distinct, local, nationalistic movements of resistance and rebellion, but specifically in the context of other hemispheric struggles. These interconnected struggles, as the author shows, largely advanced "decolonization" in a chronology of complex, contradictory, and potentially liberatory "waves." Luis-Brown employs this key word, first elaborated by W.E. Du Bois, to create an intriguing, flexible framework that allows him to slip between genres, geopolitical borders, and even concepts of time. Indeed, he defies periodicity in his work in a "chronotrope" of decolonization, which following Bakhtin, "tells stories of struggles for democracy that . . . tie together disparate spaces, crossing national, linguistic, and ethnic boundaries" (16). Luis-Brown focuses on key, but non-concurrent moments in time, that is, "waves," corresponding with the Cuban War of Independence (1898), the Mexican-Revolution (1910 - 1917), and World War I (1914 - 18). These moments, as the author argues, mark pivotal points in U.S. imperialist aggression.

As U.S. colonial subjects, Cuba and Mexico provide a logical focus for the study. Also, the considerable relationships and exchanges between authors, scholars, and activists from these two Latin American countries with communities in the U.S., especially during the Harlem Renaissance, provide ready discourses of "hemispheric citizenship" central to the author's main focus. Ultimately, Luis-Brown examines the "unfolding narratives of decolonization" in these countries "by attending to the shaping of culture through the interplay among regional and national factors and transnational forces of capital, culture, migration and travel" (28). Thus Luis-Brown organizes intricate layers of thorny arguments in clear prose that has a certain muscularity.

The author grounds much of his theoretical framework on the works of the Pan-Africanist scholar and civil rights leader W.E. Du Bois. Luis-Brown, however, also draws from a broad range of texts, fields, and periods-from the "sentimental" novels of Helen Hunt Jackson to the work of Cuban poet, statesman, and revolutionary José Martí. To his credit, Brown examines lesser known texts such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, and texts we have only just begun to excavate, such as the collective work about Santa de Cabora, a Mexican mestiza who inspired armed resistance movements against the genocidal government of Porfirio Diaz in the late twentieth century.

The author's documentation of exchanges between authors in the U.S. and Latin America are extensive and, well, at times, exhaustive. In fact, Luis-Brown, an English professor at the University of Miami, scours textual evidence with the ardor and precision of a historian, usually in order to establish the origins of a concept or the background of a particular figure. At times, one wishes for less historical background and more close-reading of the literary texts in question. Indeed, he is particularly insightful at literary analysis, demonstrating the ways in which authors can simultaneously challenge and reify neocolonial and anti-imperialist impulses.

Considering the author's penchant for establishing detailed historical relations between texts, one wonders why he fails to place his study in the context of other similar, earlier studies. He does not reference the seminal work of Philip Foner, Roberto Fernández Retamar, or Luis Perez, Jr. At one point, Luis-Brown focuses considerably on the figure of the mulatta as a site of homo-social transnational exchange. And yet Luis-Brown ignores the foundational work of Vera Kuzinski's Sugar's Secrets, a text which would have added depth and historical specificity to his analysis. He does attend to the work of Mary Louis Pratt, albeit briefly, to justify and establish his arguments.

To be fair, he is quite thorough in his use of essential theoretical texts, applying the dense material of authors like Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Frederic Jameson, Raymond Williams, and others, to simultaneously clarify and complicate questions in a genuinely productive manner. Indeed, he applies these abstract models in a way that is deeply relevant to current material global conditions. Indeed, as the author points out, Du Bois's Pan African dream of an egalitarian world governed by beauty, racial equality and full universal citizenship seems all the more urgent and poignant in the context of our own post 9/11 neo-colonial imperialist wars. Rather than fully free universal citizens, the world now seems peopled by transnational demi-citizens--refugees without rest, "enemy combatants" deemed categorical tortured non-persons. At the same time, Luis-Brown focuses on current resistance movements, such as the Zapatistas, whose struggle is especially pressing throughout the text. The author reminds us of figures such as Subcomandante Marcos, a Gramscian "organic" intellectual who "leads by obeying," as Teresa Urrea did. In doing so, he points toward a new wave of decolonization-a universalist struggle for human rights, freedom from want, oppression, racism, and the malevolence of empire.