Tag Archive

Winthrop D. Jordan

Race, Colonialism, and Language

Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation. By Sean P. Harvey. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015. 352 pages. $39.95 hardcover. Book Review by S-USIH Blogger Eran Zelnik Though we have long known that race is a social construction rather than a fixed universal category, its ubiquity both in American history and in contemporary America often renders race so obvious and immutable in our minds that we forget to appreciate its elasticity. In efforts to highlight the quality of race as historically and socially constituted, in the past few decades American intellectual and cultural historians have returned Read more