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"A truly excellent contribution that unearths new and largely unknown evidence about relationships between Puerto Ricans and African-Americans and white Americans in the continental United States and Puerto Rico. Alamo-Pastrana revises how race is to be studied and understood across national, cultural, colonial, and hierarchical cultural relations."--Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, author of Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City

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.

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CHOICE Review

Sociologist Alamo-Pastrana (Vassar) explores the ways Puerto Ricans and mainland Americans have engaged ideas about race and empire to imagine relations of power and accomplish their sociopolitical agendas in the middle decades of the 20th century. Throughout, the author reimagines the way race is approached in Puerto Rico and the black diaspora. He begins with a powerful critique of comparative scholarship on race in Puerto Rico, which, he argues, perpetuates problematic ideas about the Puerto Rican racial difference (which undergirded US imperialism) and the myth of Puerto Rican racial democracy. Seeking to move beyond comparison, Alamo-Pastrana employs "racial imbrication"--a theoretical and methodological approach that foregrounds both the points of contact and the places hidden by overlap of US and Puerto Rican racial regimes. He applies this approach to analyze the published political writings of African American internationalists and journalists, white US liberals, and Puerto Rican black radicals, all of whom sought to dismantle these generalizations about race and empire. Insightful, nuanced, and delightfully written, this book illuminates the ways even radical ideas about race and empire tended to reproduce the logics of white supremacy and empire. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Bonnie A. Lucero, University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Carlos Alamo-Pastrana is associate professor of sociology and Latin American and Latina/o studies at Vassar College.