Seams of Empire: Race and Radicalism in Puerto Rico and the United States |
Seams of Empire: Race and Radicalism in Puerto Rico and the United States
University Press of Florida
2016-05-10
232 pages
6×9
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-6256-3
Carlos Alamo-Pastrana, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latina/o Studies
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States and its history of intermixture of native, African, and Spanish inhabitants has prompted inconsistent narratives about race and power in the colonial territory. Departing from these accounts, early twentieth-century writers, journalists, and activists scrutinized both Puerto Rico’s and the United States’s institutionalized racism and colonialism in an attempt to spur reform, leaving an archive of oft-overlooked political writings.
In Seams of Empire, Carlos Alamo-Pastrana uses racial imbrication as a framework for reading this archive of little-known Puerto Rican, African American, and white American radicals and progressives, both on the island and the continental United States. By addressing the concealed power relations responsible for national, gendered, and class differences, this method of textual analysis reveals key symbolic and material connections between marginalized groups in both national spaces and traces the complexity of race, racism, and conflict on the edges of empire.
Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. The Puerto Rican Blueprint
- 2. Dispatches from the Colonial Outpost
- 3. The Living Negro in Latin America
- 4. The Republic of the Penniless
- 5. You Are Here to Listen
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index