Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom

"This bold comparative study of the complex intersectionality of mestizo nationalisms offers a persuasive and sophisticated analysis of racialization and de-racialization as forms of identity, power, and aspiration. Meticulously charting the ambivalent meanings of race, Peter Wade also tracks their continuous connection to hierarchies of status and ancestry in a comparative study that opens up important new approaches to genomics as both professional science and everyday life." - Sarah Franklin, author of Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship

"Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom is an incisive and sophisticated work by an accomplished scholar of race and genetics in the Americas. Peter Wade examines the stakes in construing or imagining mestizaje to be an antidote to racial divisions, while also surveying the ranges of its actual rates of occurrence among the distinct continental populations that were thrown together through European colonization of the Americas. This impressively written book will be well received and well read." - John Hartigan Jr., author of Race in the 21st Century: Ethnographic Approaches

“This book will be of great interest to historians of race in Latin America, as it is one of the first to extend the considerable scholarship on mestizaje and racial democracy (with its attendant debates) into a new era of genetics and genomics.… By opening a host of research paths for other scholars, the monograph proves itself to be ambitious and well executed.”

“Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom is an invaluable resource on the topic of race mixture for race scholars and Latin Americanists alike.” - G. Reginald Daniel, Hispanic American Historical Review

"Wade’s research probes the nexus of cutting-edge scientific research, historical memory, and socio-cultural scholarship. Scholars of modern Latin America, race, and the history of science will find much of use in this well written and conceptually ambitious study." - Alex K. Diamond, EIAL

"Overall, Wade creates a remarkably even-handed account, which is neither alarmist nor evangelistic about the potential for genomics to transform or reinforce racial ideologies. . . . the clear and concise descriptions of genetic theory and practices will serve as an excellent introduction to these concepts for uninitiated readers, and the book makes important contributions to existing social science discussions about the anti-racist and democratising potential of mixture and genomics in contemporary societies." - Sarah Abel, Journal of Latin American Studies

"Due to its breath and depth this is an essential book, one that will become a key academic reference about Latin American genomics, politics, and nationhood." - Ernesto Schwartz-Marin, Ethnohistory

"This book provides a significant and unusual contribution to the field of sciences by centering the analysis on Latin American scientists. For scholars of race in Latin America, Wade updates and complicates our understandings of how race has been made, unmade, and remade by scientists and policymakers."  - Nancy P. Appelbaum, Latin American Research Review

"Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom provides scholars of race, science and technology studies, and politics in liberal, democratic, capitalist societies with a toolkit, a method, and a vocabulary. Together, they help us to think about the forms that contemporary racialization takes in relation to the ever-evolving field of genomics." - Saudi Garcia, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society