Thesis advisor: Zine Magubane / Thesis advisor: Stephen Pfohl / In a series of case studies, I problematize the reification of race in the American Sociology of race from a postcolonial perspective. I argue prominent theories within the American sociology of race tend to essentialize race as a cause of racial inequality in the United States. These theories assume the existence of racial categories and then discuss how other entities become racialized into racialized social systems (Bonilla-Silva 1997), or racial projects (Omi & Winant 1994). These theories emphasize national structures, but occlude empire. I argue the occlusion of empire in the American sociology of race, particularly in theorization of racial categorization, is problematic. Empire is the structure that links race to class inequality, and produces race as a social category of exclusion. Therefore, a sociological theory of American racial inequality, which does not analyze imperialism as a structure that produces race, and rather focuses solely on national-structures, or a definition of capitalism severed from imperialism, cannot provide a thoroughly structural explanation for the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

U.S. public and private imperial interests confronted the problem of labor and labor power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the U.S. empire expanded into Latin America and the Caribbean. The question of how to make an empire work spurred the creation of new labor regimes reliant on black West Indians who traveled to work in the Panama Canal Zone and on United Fruit Company (UFCO) banana plantations. Just as importantly, new labor regimes engendered new categories for troublesome laborers. One of these classifications, “tramp,” surfaced in the United States after the U.S. Civil War as a shorthand for vagrant, vagabond, and hobo. This thesis examines the so-called “tramp crisis” of the late nineteenth century to show how questions of labor invariably shaped problems of empire. As a category, the tramp moved outside of the United States where various U.S. foreign policymakers, writers, and business officials created the idea of the “tropical tramp” in U.S. imperial spaces. This label, tropical tramp, offers scholars a different starting point to analyze larger issues of whiteness, masculinity, sexuality, class, and the U.S. empire. By following discursive formations of the tramp and tropical tramp into Central and South America, this thesis argues that the figure of the tramp represented someone unbefitting the U.S. empire’s desired sociopolitical order.