{"id":39905,"date":"2015-02-08T20:07:40","date_gmt":"2015-02-08T20:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39905"},"modified":"2017-03-23T19:27:19","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T19:27:19","slug":"scripts-of-blackness-race-cultural-nationalism-and-u-s-colonialism-in-puerto-rico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39905","title":{"rendered":"Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

University of Illinois Press<\/a>
\nFebruary 2015
\n320 pages
\n6.125 x 9.25 in.
\n38 black & white photographs, 3 maps, 1 chart, 3 tables
\nCloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03890-7
\nPaper ISBN: 978-0-252-08045-6<\/p>\n

Isar P. Godreau<\/strong><\/a>, Researcher and Former Director
\nInstitute for Interdisciplinary Research
\nUniversity of Puerto Rico, Cayey<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ideas of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture in a Puerto Rican barrio<\/em><\/p>\n

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico<\/a>, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness<\/em>, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race\u2014created to overcome U.S. colonial power\u2014simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.<\/p>\n

Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio<\/a> of San Ant\u00f3n<\/a> in the city of Ponce<\/a>, Scripts of Blackness<\/em> examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile <\/a>discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Ant\u00f3n and its residents as black.<\/p>\n

Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness<\/em> provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness<\/em>, whiteness<\/em>, and racial mixture<\/em>.<\/p>\n