Uneven Encounters

Front matter

ENCOUNTERS

MAKING RACE AND NATION IN BRAZIL AND THE UNITED STATES

Uneven Encounters

Contents

Illustrations ix Preface xi

Note on Language xvii Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1

. Producing Consumption: Coffee and Consumer Citizenship 13

Preface

Over the years I have been working on this book, some of the circumstances that prompted its writing have shifted. There is now not quite such a dearth of transnational history or work on U.S. empire, for example. Yet other pieces of its prompting conditions remain intractably in place. One of the most recalcitrant is the comparative mindset people bring to the contemplation of race in the United States and Brazil. Even when I feel I have cleanly explained my objections to comparing race in national contexts, some of my interlocutors, academic and non-academic alike, will have failed to hear them. It is as if comparison were so essential to long-distance contemplation that no other lens were possible. Isn't it true, people offer, that U.S. and Brazilian racial systems are really different? Isn't Brazil a much more racially mixed society than the United States? In terms of racism, isn't Brazil/the United States better/ worse? I wish my work would shift the frame of analysis so that such questions become not just unanswerable, but also unaskable.

My objections to these questions can be briefly and simply put! Comparisons require generalizations about U.S. and Brazilian national racial identities that cannot be right because they cannot be national, for truly, nothing is. No single social trait characterizes a whole nation and nothing but the nation, and no single ideological framework pertains evenly across an entire national space. Most of these comparisons also biologize race by implying that mixture occurred in one of the two nations earlier or later than the other, measuring against an ostensible purity or positing a moment of purity at some previous point? Notions of national racial ideologies of the United States and Brazil get nation wrong and race wrong, and xii Preface they get the specifics wrong too. That is, the perfectly opposed guiding myths of racial purity in the United States and racial harmony in Brazil reference social systems that have an awful lot in common. North Americans lived amid constant racial mixing, interracial social intimacy, a huge range of racial identities neither black nor white, and evidence everywhere of how hollow were the claims of white supremacy.’ Brazil's virulent, socially structuring racism included explicitly racialized processes of criminalization and discipline, the circumscription of social opportunities for darker citizens even to the point of lynching, and constant attempts by whiter citizens to deny African ancestry and prevent further Afro-descended members from branching into their family trees.* Both Brazil and the United States leaned heavily on "race" to structure social hierarchy, and within both vast territories, the experience of that reliance varied greatly.

This opposition, while wrong, is useful. It is useful in the unfortunate sense that it does ideological work. It helps people articulate and recirculate notions of purity and mixture and reassert the primacy of black and white at the exclusion of categories such as "Asian" or “Latino” that might disrupt the national narratives these fictions underlie. But it is also useful in the more productive sense of being "good for thinking," for such striking, impossible parity highlights the artifice of its own formation. It points us to the fact that comparison is a construction site, where U.S. and Brazilian racializations are built up together.

To get at that process of transnational racial construction, I have tried to develop a method that can serve as a counterpoint to comparison. Despite the full country names in the book's title (a concession to publisher and bookstore needs), this book does not compare the United States and Brazil or any subset thereof. It seeks instead a sample of the myriad connections linking people who resided (most of the time) in cities within the geographic borders of those two territories. Sometimes people gazed out at each other to understand themselves as national beings, using their viewfinders to locate useful touchpoints. More often in this book, they did so not as representatives of their national units but as members of other social formations, imagining themselves in relation to and in solidarity with each other. The communities they imagined in that process (to paraphrase Benedict Anderson) were odd-shaped beasts, neither fully within nor simply larger than their nation-states. They wove global filaments into local social worlds, operating at "scales that are both smaller and larger than the nation-state."*

Preface xiii

This is my working definition of “transnational” and of transnational method. Where international history explores the relations of nation-states (or just states) as well-bounded subjects, transnational history explores the global in the local, via interactions of groups or entities that do not fit national borders, whether because they are greater or lesser or both. Examples of such border-disrespecting units include geographic features such as rivers, political spaces such as borderlands, and far-flung people who imagine themselves in community. These could include individuals who identified within and across national borders as “men” or “law-abiding citizens" or “Christians” or even “coffee drinkers” and, of course, as members of the African diaspora. Diasporas and the African diaspora principally are the quintessential transnational units, unevenly distributed and defined, shaped in opposition to nation-states and in contested collaborations across national lines. “Diasporan subjects are transnational subjects,” as Robin Kelley points out, and in that sense African diaspora studies and its predecessors have always been transnational and are critical guides for transnational method now.’ As these examples suggest, transnational subjects are not the exception but the rule, at least in globalized eras such as the past half-millennium of European expansion, capitalism, and African slavery. Everything has a transnational aspect or two, for every local has global threads woven through.

What I have delineated above is far from the only definition of transnational method in circulation today. Other scholars prefer other definitions, and the term "transnational" is in such vogue that many use it without any particular definition in mind at all. Some assume "transnational history" is a synonym for “world history,” as if "trans" meant merely “bigger.” Some posit any border crosser a "transnational" subject, with similarly dulling effect. I remain unconvinced that there is any difference between a migrant who crosses national borders and a “transmigrant.”” Many observers think transnational method assumes the obsolescence of nations. On the contrary; in my view, the value of transnational method is its ability to examine and critique the nationalism that remains a powerful political and intellectual force. Transnational subjects overflow and challenge national borders not in blithe disregard for those borders but because nation-states so profoundly, even violently, constrain them. Nationalism has ceded to globalized formations neither in world politics nor in the academy, where national frameworks continue to define both fields of study broadly and individual research projects.

In addition to its debt to African diaspora studies, this version of transxiv Preface national method owes much to radical geographers extending the legacy of theorists of world systems, themselves in turn extending the legacy of that obscure nineteenth-century transnationalist, Karl Marx. I phrase in this way to emphasize again that transnational method is not new, despite its neologism, and to underline my debt to and continuity with such theorists, despite a critical difference. Where theorists of global economic exploitation tend to emphasize the power of the core over the periphery, I trace vectors of influence in opposite directions, from colony to metropole, marginal subject to enfranchised elite, black to white, and cultural to political (among others). That is not to minimize the power of the center to wreak enormous violence on regions under its control. The exchanges explored in this book do not right the imbalances of race, nation, gender, class, or region, for none escaped their hierarchical matrices cleanly. Still, the stories they animate both reflect and complicate our understandings of such imbalance and perhaps uncover ways in which people today might intercede.

Transnational method is well set to pay such attention to bottom-up flow thanks to another set of debts, these owed to scholars and thinkers struggling against colonialism, including internal colonialism. Elsewhere I have tried to elaborate this relationship and its implications for academic method.? Uneven Encounters reflects this debt to those post- and anti-colonial scholars within and outside the United States who have explored the ways identity and experience are shaped in relation — through such factors as proximity, distance, similarity, difference, affinity, and conflict. Scholars in queer studies have incorporated these insights as well, so that their arguments and mine regarding passing and drag or the key roles of gender and sexuality in the elaboration of national identity all contain a doubling back to Third World and U.S. women of color scholars writing since the 1930s.’ That foundation is too often overlooked, just as coffee drinkers rarely remember the travels of the sweat-soaked bean. Their cumulative insights point to the transnational contours of the nation, which, like the self, emerges in relation to others.

Straddling diaspora studies, Brazilian history, and U.S. history, and drawing sustenance from postcolonial and queer theory, this book is engaged in disciplinary Twister™. If it stands squarely anywhere, it is among American studies work on empire, which in the last decade and a half has grown into a vibrant field.” Amy Kaplan, whose essay in a 1993 anthology sounded a resonant call to address the absence of empire in the study

Preface xv of U.S. culture, pointed her 2002 book toward the "confounding of the borders between the foreign and the domestic.”" Christina Klein more straightforwardly calls a critical perspective transnational if it "enables us to see how the local and the global are inextricably bound up with one another.” ” Seth Fein calls transnational those "forces produced by the presence of one nation within another"? While Kaplan and Klein focus on the world's presence within the United States and Fein considers U.S. presence in Mexico, their applications of transnational method all pursue versions of the global in the local, as do mine.

The field of American studies has embraced transnational method in order to critique U.S. nationalism in the era of U.S. imperialism. Such work leans on the increased attention to nationalism in the wake of postwar, postcolonial, and post-Soviet "national explosions" (as Benedict Anderson called them) and the growing willingness to see the United States as an empire after the demise of the USSR and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq." By paying attention to the cultural aspects of international politics, non-elite agency, resistance, and hybridity(for example), and by historicizing the nation, revealing it changing over time rather than transcendent or essential, transnational scholarship can powerfully critique the nation form at a moment when we need such a critique badly.

In American studies, many scholars are pursuing the study of empire in imaginative and productive ways, yet few works extend themselves fully into the history and historiography of the places whose traces they track. Focusing only on the country in which one lives keeps a scholar from certain fertile encounters. Language acquisition, the assimilation of scholarly literatures, and the personal contacts of collegiality are investments that create both stakes and debt. If the only North Americans who enter into such commerce, reaping its benefits in insight, are scholars of those other places, then the entire fields of North American history, culture, and social life remain untouched by that insight, while all the theoretical wealth of American studies, such as queer and postcolonial substreams, explorations of intersectionality, and analyses of racial construction, can elude North American scholars of other places.

North America-focused work on U.S. imperial history or culture can posit but not pinpoint the agency of foreign subjects. Nor, in tracing the global in the local, can it see what foreign subjects do with those traces as they watch their ideological and cultural production resonate and distort in North American contexts. Nor can it see the reworked phenomena as xvi Preface they alter local conditions and then travel yet again. The point is simply this: global circuits of culture and ideas never come to rest. To follow a single journey is to miss the previous trips woven into the slope and speed of the next. Uneven Encounters follows some of the multiple travels woven into ideas of race and nation by looking at a particular set of historical subjects who grabbed and manipulated them, infusing them with another dose of energy and sending them once again into motion.

The language of motion here is slightly misleading, for often the only traveling is done by ideas or cultural forms, which are subsets of each other (ideas are cultural forms, and cultural forms are also ideas; race and nation are both). In some ways a metaphor of conversation better conveys the dynamic this book explores, in which most people are standing more or less still, exchanging information about certain consequential social categories.” A conversation, though, is awfully calm. It fails to capture the violence that keeps some people in some places and sends others into motion and the resulting ways people engage, singing to and yelling at each other across achingly distant, distorting caverns of geography, language, station, time, and so on. Across these multiple distances and distortions, their suggestions and contentions reach intended and unintended targets who then— not willfully yet very carefully — misinterpret, rework, and recirculate them in their intimate environs, propelling their collective, conflictive work once again to the echoing canyon.

Looking in this way can reveal some things that otherwise often remain obscure, particularly in comparative frameworks: the power of non-elite subjects to see very far afield; to understand the world as well as anybody can; and to influence people, institutions, and ideas that seem unyieldingly more powerful than they. It shows disfranchised people actively making careful decisions, sharply constrained by complex economic and political factors as well as outright repression, and it shows how their decisions matter. Eroding assumptions of the passivity, ignorance, and impotence of marginalized people, this optic would encourage imperial subjects who desire global justice to try to follow rather than assume they must lead.

Note on Language

The descendants of Africans in Brazil in the 1920s called themselves and each other a broad array of terms. They used negro, de cór, de classe, preto, pardo, mulato, other color terms, and all the terms for white shades as well, of course — and many refused racial or color identifications at all, sometimes successfully. Historical actors are as inconsistent as contemporary subjects; all of us encounter and use the instability of racial categories. So how should a historian write of such subjects when discussing the impact of race?

For historians to use a single term carries elements of coercion, forcing people into categories they resist or exceed, and ironing over bountiful heterogeneity. Yet the use of multiple, inequivalent terms makes it difficult or impossible to recognize the organizing power of racism. Worse, accepting the classification system on the ground in the period studied can strengthen those elements in contemporary ideology that are the legacies of that period. I negotiate between these twin dilemmas with a split decision. In my own writing, I embrace the artifice of anachronistic umbrella terms that highlight rather than conceal that process of coercion and allow, albeit imperfectly, for a discussion of racism. For Brazilian subjects I choose “Afro-Brazilian” and “Afro-descended,” the terms emerging from anti-racist activism in Brazil since the late 1970s, avowals of solidarity with Portugal's ex-colonies in Africa and with Afro-diasporic communities worldwide. I use "African American" for Afro-descended North Americans not from Canada (gritting my teeth about the equation of "America" with the United States as the alternative is simply too unwieldy). More happily, I use “Afro-American” for people of African dexviii Note on Language scent from anywhere in the Americas, including the United States and Brazil. I even indulge in “black,” most often in the pursuit of readability. I tend to prefer “whiter” to “white” to recognize the equally fluid, relative quality of this adjective and often use “elites” rather than “whites” in a nod to the imperfect convergence of race and power.

These are my choices for my own prose. When it comes to reprinting and translating primary sources, I take an opposite tack toward the same goals. The texts cited in this work adhere strictly to the original. I have not smoothed over errors nor modernized the Portuguese. Attentive readers will find occasional “errors” such as “paes” rather than “pais”; “cor” as well as “côr” (once even in the same sentence); and variations in the orthography of names (writers in the Afro-Brazilian press sometimes spelled their own names differently in different bylines; I do not presume to decide which one was their true name). For the most part these are offered unencumbered by the textual clutter of [sic]. Preserving these variations sustains the beacon of anachronism — that disjuncture that reminds the reader she is encountering a foreign country, the past. It respects the material and also the reader, who can more confidently form her own opinion in relation to sources free of yet another layer of mediation.

Yet my goal is not to provide a clear view based on unaltered primary sources—on the contrary. So many strata of mediation interfere in contemplating the history of race in the United States and Brazil from this book’s twenty-first century U.S. perspective: translating Portuguese to English, locating Brazilian racial systems in North American terms, and bridging past and present. Any rendering of Brazilian racial terms into U.S. English is necessarily multiply inadequate. I address the question of translation substantively in chapter six, but throughout the book I engage it implicitly by leaving many words for race in the body of the text alongside their translations, or untranslated words within translated sections when the meanings will be evident from context. I hope the awkwardness of anachronism and untranslated terms will help to highlight inequivalence, the changing of racial terms over time, the struggles behind those changes, and the ultimate irretrievability of precise meanings for extinct racial categories. This strategy contains a plea to recognize and accept a certain measure of ignorance about terms for race. Only such ignorance genuinely respects the status of race as a social construction—if we knew what race “really” was, what would we know it to be?

Acknowledgments

There is great joy in owing so much to the many people who have guided and supported me through this work. I thank them here in roughly chronological chunks but with no particular internal order. In the dissertation stage, I was blessed with a brilliant set of mentors: my adviser, Robin D. G. Kelley; exam and dissertation readers Lisa Duggan and George Yúdice; and dissertation readers Diana Taylor and Olívia Gomes da Cunha. I benefited immeasurably from my other professors and mentors at NYU, including Nikhil Pal Singh, Robert Stam, Martha Hodes, Ada Ferrer, and Judith Halberstam.

From my first dissertation research to my last moments of revision, I have leaned heavily on Rio de Janeiro friends and mentors, including Olívia Gomes da Cunha, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Tiago de Melo Gomes, Rose Sant'anna, Edmeire Exaltação, Jurema Verneck, and Luciene Fortuna and Brazilianist colleagues and friends Judith Williams, Amy Chazkel, Darien Davis, Sonia Roncador, Kim Butler (who gave wonderful, generous comments on an early version of the manuscript and again at a later date), Michael Mitchell (who read and encouraged me via e-mail for months during the first revisions), Denise Ferreira da Silva, James Green, Jerry Dávila, Bryan McCann, Edward Telles, David Hellwig (without whose edited volume I could not have conceived of my dissertation), Jeffrey Lesser (who before we ever met sent me documents from his own research in an archive that had since closed and later supported me generously at Emory), Barbara Weinstein (admired friend and my model of academic integrity), Daryle Williams (inspiring co-director of the Driskell Center), and Steven Topik (tireless correspondent on any coffee-related query).

xx Acknowledgments

At Bowdoin College I appreciated the supportive enthusiasm of Randolph Stakeman, Allen Wells, Patrick Rael, Krista Van Vleet, and Marilyn Reizbaum, and at the University of Maryland, I basked in the sweet wisdom of Driskell Center director Eileen Julien and extended my research base in inspiring conversation with her, Daryle Williams, Barbara Weinstein, Mary Kay Vaughan, Elsa Barkeley Brown, Clyde Woods, and the incredibly generous and insightful Julia Foulkes. My research that term at the Smithsonian Institution was deftly guided by Fath Ruffins and radical poet-archivist Reuben Jackson.

In Los Angeles I was buoyed up by my wonderful colleagues at the California State University, Los Angeles (csuLA): Mark Wild, Peter Sigal, Alejandra Marchevsky, Victor Viesca, Christopher Endy, Beth Baker- Cristales, colleagues in the Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities and the Rockefeller Program and by astonishing students, including Gustavo Lopez, Jasmine Guerrero, and Kyelynn Chiong; by members of the Los Angeles Latin American History reading group: Robin Derby and Maria Elena Martinez; and especially by my trusted friend David Sartorius, who consulted with endless goodwill and great judgment. Three other beloved scholarly friends in Los Angeles cheered and advised this project: Teo Ruiz, Vanessa Schwartz, and Ruthie Gilmore — thank you. Also absolutely sustaining was the collaboration and inspiration of Critical Resistance rudders Melissa Burch, Ruthie Gilmore, Craig Gilmore, Roy San Filippo, and Rose Braz. Thank you, Robs. Thank you, Maxa. Thank you, WH,0. Thanks to the participants in the Tepoztlán Institute on Transnational History, who have supported and guided my thinking on transnational method, especially Jocelyn Olcott and the institute's huge-hearted directors, Pamela Voekel and Elliott Young.

In an outstanding year at Cornell's Society for the Humanities (son), I benefited from the rich companionship of my brilliant fellow fellows, in particular those who read large portions of this manuscript or talked thorny points all the way through with me: Lucinda Ramberg, Sarah Evans, Suman Seth, and Jeff Cowie; thanks to Andy Hobarek for my title, to Matthew Hart for productive provocations on the question of modernity, and to director Brett de Bary for sweet guidance; thanks to Cornell faculty participants in the Comparative History Colloquium: Ray Craib, Mary Roldan, and especially my old new friend Duane Corpis; thanks to these and all the fellows for Gimme! daytime and sudsy evening debates over the global post . . . whatever: Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Igor Ayora-

Acknowledgments xxi

Diaz, Belinda Edmondson, Stanka Radovic, Noa Vaisman, Natalie Melas, Erin Hyman, Jenny Mann, Phil Stern, Petrus Liu, and, up the road at Syracuse, the fearless Jenna Loyd. I could not have finished this project without the incredible structure the soH provided and am profoundly grateful to its organizers.

Thanks for helpful e-mailing and discussion to Frederick Cooper, Doris Witt, Timothy Brennan, Deborah Cohen, and Steven Selka; thanks to M. Elizabeth Ginway for extensive correspondence regarding Elsie Houston and for sharing her unpublished interview notes with me. Thanks to David Kazanjian for reading a long excerpt and for subsequent helpful comments; to Jordana Rosenberg for readings and thinkings-through; thanks for help in musical analysis to pianist and music historian Clifford Korman; Cornell musicologist Steven Pond; and flutist Jayn Rosenfeld, my mother, who in addition read and helped hone most if not all of the chapters while listening to all the, how shall I say, background noise. Thanks to Peter Winn and to my treasured friend Karen Krahulik, both of whom read the entire manuscript and gave wonderful comments, a labor of loving collegiality for which I am deeply grateful. Thanks to the excellent Duke University Press (Dur) readers, especially the three of whom identified themselves to me and extended their already enormously helpful comments in subsequent conversations, Kim Butler, Sueann Caulfield, and Maria Josefina Saldafia-Portillo. Thanks to my brilliant and dear friend Seth Fein, eminent theorist-practitioner of transnational history, who among many other acts of selfless and sweet support helped shepherd this book into this series; thanks to series editors Gil Joseph and Emily Rosenberg for receiving it there; thanks to Valerie Milholland, Neal McTighe, and Miriam Angress of DUP for constant encouragement and expertise.

For financial and institutional support for this work, I gratefully thank the Rockefeller Foundation, first at UNICAMP and later at CSULA; the Foreign Language and Area Studies Program of the Department of Education, also twice, first for language study and then for archival research in Brazil; the New York University (Nvv) Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; the Nyu Dean's Dissertation Fellowship program; the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos; the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)'s Programa Avançado de Cultura Contemporânea; Bowdoin College; Emory University; the Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora and the Arts at the University of Maryland, College Park; CSULA; the Cornell University sou; and Indiana University, Bloomington. Perhaps xxii Acknowledgments this will strike some readers as odd, but I am also grateful to this book itself. Its provocations and demands in themselves at times sustained me.

Finally, one person is responsible for this work in more ways than is usually possible: my father. As a child, I would hang around his study, reading titles off the spines of his library and asking what each book was about. He answered with such joyous interest that it did not occur to me that I was interrupting him until I became a reader of similar books. AII my life my father has engaged, disagreed, and debated with me with this same interested, fierce respect. At the same time, he has met my every joy with joy and every sadness with unmatched empathy. I am the scholar and the person that I am because of him.

Introduction

All his life, anti-racist activist José Correia Leite, co-founder of the longest-lived newspaper in the São Paulo black press, retained a global perspective he had acquired just after the First World War. In his memoirs, Leite recalled in particular the window the war opened onto transatlantic racial politics:

The American Negroes in France, when they marched separately from the whites, began to notice that the United States was heavily criticized for its racial discrimination. And also when they saw how the Senegalese army marched in Paris—those Frenchwomen draped around the necks of those big Negroes [negrões] — they saw that they were wrong to think that American whites’ racial discrimination was a generalized thing. ... That came to our attention here. We also began to use those facts as example. . . . All that was published in the papers, and we saw it as based in the influence of the First World War.

While Leite's local social sphere in São Paulo included few African American or African subjects, his understanding of the world incorporated them and more. Gazing over equator and ocean with the help of the newspaper press, Leite was entranced by the range of Afro-diasporic subjects and racial attitudes he observed, and he was transformed by his revelations, as was a generation of his peers in all the places he noted.

Perhaps it is surprising that such a modest figure paid so much attention to such far-away places and people in this moment prior to electronic telecommunication. From a twenty-first century vantage point, it is hard to grasp “how effectively illiterate people with such particularist loyalties could communicate on a global scale, bridging continents," as another observer of non-elite world travelers has noted.’ It is easier to succumb to the evolutionist feeling that only now could such communication occur— as if, as one U.S. scholar of Brazil suggested, until "the 1970s, black Brazilians had little information about U.S. blacks due to the barrier of language.”* A related misconception imagines that marginalized people are too oppressed to act on their own behalf. As another North American academic wrote, explaining Afro-Brazilians "failure" to fight racism, "day-to-day survival [is] so difficult and time consuming that it is virtually impossible to concentrate on politics."^ As Leite confirms, these statements are simply not true.

The notion that non-elites in global peripheries were isolated rests upon the idea that the technology required for global communication has only recently emerged — that only in the last forty years or so has the world entered the age of "globalization"? It underestimates the efficacy of all previous communications technologies from print media and music all the way back to the canoe, discounting as well the abilities of people in earlier moments to use them. The view that poverty prohibits politics forgets those for whom day-to-day survival is political. It erases the agency of non-elite historical subjects and confines politics to the tiniest formal arena, denying the utility of cultural politics? While those to whom luxury travel and formal education are denied certainly have avenues of global encounter and action closed to them, no one stops thinking or negotiating the world around them just because they are working.

Communication among the enslaved is the quintessential refutation of such misconceptions. It bridged divides of distance, language, time, and culture since the first forced migrations of the Atlantic slave trade. Slave resistance mocks the idea that the overworked cannot engage in political acts, and it often grew or grew bolder due to long-distance communication? Slave communication routes across the Americas and the Atlantic, evolved and reworked by commerce and technological change, undergird the twentieth-century channels of transnational exchange that are the subject of this book.

Transnational exchange reflects the global imagination and reach of people enmeshed in global systems, whether they toiled and traveled the reaches of the Roman or Mongolian empires, the trade routes of the thirteenth-century Mediterranean world, or the networks of capitalism,

European expansion, and African slavery that have traversed the planet in the last five hundred years. This framing reminds us that global links are forged in violence and resistance, a fact neglected by those who celebrate blithe, frictionless digital-age globalization. It also moves toward the recognition of the global formation of the largest units of social relation in our global era, the categories of race and nation. Situating Leite in his rightful place as an agent of transnational exchange adds a third point, distinctly hopeful: not only did non-elites develop large-scale social imaginations, but they used them to resist and reshape their local worlds. Uneven Encounters presents a cast of characters situated along the full range of international and domestic social hierarchies, who used their global vision to rework lived ideas of race and nation?