I found all the essays in this very diverse collection to be at once historical, anecdotal, and a real pleasure to read. I found these essays to be pioneering in their efforts to demonstrate that we must have studies that do more than compare the constructions of race across time and geography. These essays show that we must be attentive to the ways the very exchanges and amiable and inimical encounters across the Atlantic were and remain fundamental to our contemporary devisings of race in Anglicized and Americanized cultures. Anyone interested in how the local can and does transmogrify into more troubling universalist truths will find this diverse collection an excellent piece of argumentative evidence. - Arthur L. Little, Jr., Associate Professor of English, UCLA, author of Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice