Description
Book SynopsisIn Imaging The Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race and Gender during the American Century, Hilda Lloréns offers a ground-breaking study of imagesphotographs, postcards, paintings, posters, and filmsabout Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans made by American and Puerto Rican image-makers between 1890 and 1990. Through illuminating discussions of artists, images, and social events, the book offers a critical analysis of the power-laden cultural and historic junctures imbricated in the creation of re-presentations of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans by Americans (outsiders) and Puerto Ricans (insiders) during an historical epoch marked by the twin concepts of modernization and progress. The study excavates the ways in which colonial power and resistance to it have shaped representations of Puerto Rico and its people. Hilda Lloréns demonstrates how nation, race, and gender figure in representation, and how these representations in turn help shape the discourses of nation, race, and gende
Trade ReviewLloréns engages the complex and contradictory images of nation, gender, and race, all set within the history of Puerto Rico and its colonial relationship with the United States. Her narrative invites a much-needed debate about the construction of race, racism, and nation in Puerto Rico. * New West Indian Guide *
Lloréns’ book offers a much-needed interdisciplinary analysis of the relationship between art and the visual politics of ‘othering’ entrenched in colonial practices. Lloréns looks closely at photographs, visual works, and art produced during key periods of Puerto Rican history (between 1890 and 1990). By skillfully contrasting local and colonial visual representations, she reveals how the work of Puerto Rican artists is in dialogue (sometimes also in confrontation) with U. S. economic interests and institutions. -- Isar P. Godreau, University of Puerto Rico at Cayey
Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Looking into the Frame Chapter 1: Imaging Puerto Rican Natives, 1890-1920 Chapter 2: Building a “Photographic Case” for the Rehabilitation of the Colony, 1930s Chapter 3: The Emergence of Black-Puerto Ricans in Portraiture, 1930s Chapter 4: Setting the Stage for Mid-Twentieth Century Imagery of Puerto Rico, 1920-1951 Chapter 5: The Rise of Cultural Nationalism and Filmic Narratives of Blackness, 1948-1970 Chapter 6: Dynamics of the 1970s: National and Racial Transfigurations Chapter 7: What the American Century has Wrought: Puerto Rican Images in the Late Twentieth Century Epilogue: Representing Puerto Rico during the American Century References Index About the Author
