Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference

Rating:
Summary: Cobbled Together, Disappointing
Review: Any serious scholar who reads this book's introduction will get the feeling it was cobbled together from yet one more conference that didn't quite work out. Too wide-ranging to hold together theoretically, the piecemeal and somewhat simplistic analysis of the introductory chapter is disappointing. This is an important topic and one would have expected veteran Donald Moore to do better, even though it's an edited volume. A few of the individual chapters are interesting, although those authors have done better work elsewhere, such as Tania Li, Paul Gilroy, or Donna Haraway. The chapter which holds promise as covering some new ground is the one by Alcida Ramos, an innovative and synthetic thinker, although it too would benefit from more polish and finesse. The whole volume has a hasty feeling to it and is ultimately a disappointment.