{"id":51328,"date":"2017-01-27T19:50:26","date_gmt":"2017-01-27T19:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=51328"},"modified":"2017-01-27T19:50:26","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T19:50:26","slug":"the-failed-project-of-blackness-in-contemporary-afro-puerto-rican-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=51328","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018Failed\u2019 Project of Blackness in Contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican Discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u2018Failed\u2019 Project of Blackness in Contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican Discourse<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

A Contra corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America<\/a>
\nVolume 5, Number 3, Spring 2008<\/a>
\npages 243-251<\/p>\n

Sonja Stephenson Watson<\/strong><\/a>, Director of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program; Associate Professor of Spanish
\nUniversity of Texas, Arlington<\/em><\/p>\n

Escritura afropuertorrique\u00f1a y modernidad<\/em> (2007), by Eleuterio Santiago-D\u00edaz<\/a>, is an insightful critical work on contemporary afropuertorican discourse with an emphasis on the writings of Carmelo Rodr\u00edguez Torres<\/a>. The work commences by situating Puerto Rico<\/a> in the \u201cBlack Atlantic,\u201d that is, the greater African Diaspora<\/a>. Ironically, Santiago-D\u00edaz begins and ends his study noting that his research on Afro-Puerto Rico and Rodr\u00edguez Torres is simultaneously an affirmation and a negation of black identity because it counters official discourses of racial homogeneity during the island\u2019s nation-building period which posited blackness over whiteness. This racial oppression and suppression of blackness stems from early twentieth-century (1930s and 1940s) Puerto Rican national discourse which erased blackness from the national imaginary and contributed to the failed black project of modernity. Thus, Santiago-D\u00edaz argues that afropuertorican discourse is a failed modern project stemming from Antonio de Nebrija\u2019s<\/a> seminal text Gram\u00e1tica castellana<\/em> (1492) and the literary whitening that resulted from it. Instead of illustrating the complexity of Afro-Puerto Rican discourse, these contemporary texts illustrate the suppression of Afrocentricity that can be traced to the publication of Gram\u00e1tica<\/em>. As the title suggests, Santiago-D\u00edaz places the work in modernity and views it from a cultural studies perspective, stemming from the identity politics research of black British cultural critic Paul Gilroy<\/a> (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness<\/em><\/a> 1993) and the late Afro-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois<\/a>. Du Bois\u2019 work on double consciousness (The Souls of Black Folk<\/em><\/a> 1903), that is, the duality of being both black and (North) American, explicates the problematic of identity and the complexities of it in Puerto Rico, which is rooted in multiple representations of identity (white, mixed-race, mulatto<\/a>, black, etc.) Finally, he uses performance studies to illustrate that blackness is a performance that is never realized due to a colonial discourse of whiteness…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The \u2018Failed\u2019 Project of Blackness in Contemporary Afro-Puerto Rican Discourse A Contra corriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America Volume 5, Number 3, Spring 2008 pages 243-251 Sonja Stephenson Watson, Director of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program; Associate Professor of Spanish University of Texas, Arlington Escritura afropuertorrique\u00f1a y modernidad (2007), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,1196,8,20],"tags":[26054,26053,2654,17419,17408,17418],"class_list":["post-51328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-carmelo-rodriguez-torres","tag-eleuterio-santiago-diaz","tag-puerto-rico","tag-sonja-s-watson","tag-sonja-stephenson-watson","tag-sonja-watson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51328"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51329,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51328\/revisions\/51329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}