Race and the Politics of Knowledge Production ─ Diaspora and Black Transnational Scholarship in the United States and Brazil

In this co-edited volume, Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour and Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman have invited contributors of African descent from the United States and Brazil to reflect on their multidimensional experiences in the field as researchers, collaborators, and allies to communities of color. Contributors promote an interdisciplinary perspective, as they represent the fields of sociology, political science, anthropology, and the humanities. They engage W.E.B. Du Bois' notion of 'second-sight,' which suggests that the unique positionality of Black researchers might provide them with advantages in their empirical observations and knowledge production. They expose the complex and contradictory efforts, discourses, and performances that Black researchers must use to implement and develop their community-centered research agenda. They illustrate that 'second-sight' is not inevitable but must be worked at and is sometimes not achieved in certain research and cultural contexts.

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour is Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, USA. She was the 2013-2014 Lemann Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, USA.

Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman is Assistant Professor of Sociology with a joint appointment in the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida, USA. She is a 2015–2016 Fulbright Scholar to Brazil.