Book Review

Micol Seigel’s Uneven Encounters could not have come at a more perfect time. Published on the eve of the bicentennial celebration of independence in several Latin American republics, Seigel convincingly argues against the nation-state as the hegemonic unit of analysis for understanding the con-struction of race and nation in the Americas. Seigel proposes that Brazilians and North Americans defined their racial and national identities through transnational dialogues. Although this is not a completely new argument and it has become a standard in the subarea of transnational history, what is really new about Uneven Encounters is its unique and rich analysis of these tran-snational connections. These dialogues emanated from the extant circuits of knowledge that governed global-local cultural currents in the first half of the 20th century. These circuits produced cultural exchanges that ranged from the articulation of what could be defined as a transnational imagined com-munity of the Black press to the production of consumption of coffee and coffee drinkers in the Atlantic basin. Since the publication of Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas in 1946, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have engaged in comparative analysis of racial relations between two societ-ies that at first glance seem comparable. First, both societies resulted from the expansion and colonization of the non-Western world. Second, the Portuguese and the English both established settler colonies that displaced, marginalized, or subordinated indigenous populations. Third, each of these areas of colonization imported enslaved Africans to meet with the labor needs that the settlers themselves were unable to undertake. And fourth, both societies developed at an early stage a color code to determine social status. Historians such as Carl Degler, Thomas Skidmore, and Georg