Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on race, gender, and sexuality characterized Blackness as emotionally distinct in both deficiency and excess, a contrast with the emotional benevolence accorded to Whiteness. Ideas on racialized emotions have simultaneously driven the development of devastating body politics by enslaving structures of power. Bold and thought provoking, She Is Weeping provides a new understanding of racialized emotions in the Atlantic World, and how these discourses proved instrumental to the rise of slavery and racial capitalism, racialized sexual violence, and the expansion of the carceral state.

Finalist, 2024 Outstanding First Book Prize, Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora

'She is Weeping is an uncompromising indictment of the tendency to characterize people of African descent as figures who simultaneously feel 'too much' and 'too little.' In this sweeping work of intellectual history, Gutarra Cordero makes a convincing case for the endurance and power of these centuries-old conceptions of Black emotional deviance, linking these deep-seated cultural beliefs to the rise of Atlantic World slavery and racial capitalism, the persistence of racialized sexual violence, and the expansion of the carceral state in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.'

Erica L. Ball - author of To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class

'Lithely guiding readers through an intellectual history of racism’s somatic terrain from the 1700s to the present, Dannelle Gutarra Cordero provides evidence of how racialized emotionality scaffolds racial science and consequentially produces various forms of carcerality. She powerfully engages in the political economy of the affective discomforts of 'emotional others' arguing that racial science is deeper than anthropometry, craniometry, and the fictive fringe interpretations that support eugenics.'

Dana-Ain Davis - author of Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy and Premature Birth

'Dannelle Gutarra Cordero insightfully illuminates how slavery across Las Americas (North and South America and the Caribbean) all relied upon racialized notions of the emotional differences between Black and White bodies, and set the stage for the legacy of racialized policing we have today. By employing a cross-hemispheric analysis of the history of emotional policing of racialized bodies, Gutarra Cordero crucially contextualizes how much 'racialized slavery never ended'. An important new voice on race today.'

Tanya Katerí Hernández - author of Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law and the New Civil Rights Response

'The book's most enduring contribution is its broad scope spanning ancient history to contemporary issues regarding poverty, disenfranchisement, and human trafficking … This book will surely impact future studies regarding slavery, intellectual history, and systemic racism … Recommended.'

C. L. Stacey Source: Choice