Imaging The Great Puerto Rican Family

Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century

By (author) Hilda Lloréns

Not available to order

Publication date:

30 October 2014

Length of book:

290 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739189191

In Imaging The Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race and Gender during the American Century, Hilda Lloréns offers a ground-breaking study of images—photographs, postcards, paintings, posters, and films—about 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 gender. Imaging The Great Puerto Rican Family masterfully illustrates that as significant actors in the shaping of national conceptions of history image-makers have created iconic symbols deeply enmeshed in an “emotional aesthetics of nation.” The book proposes that images as important conveyers of knowledge and information are a fertile data site. At the same time, Lloréns underscores how colonial modernity turned global, the conceptual framework informing the analysis, not only calls attention to the national and global networks in which image-makers have been a part of, and by which they have been influenced, but highlights the manners by which technologies of imaging and “seeing” have been prime movers as well as critics of modernity.

List 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

Hilda Lloréns offers a special and coherent account of Puerto Rican politics and culture in the 20^th century as viewed through the lens of photographic and graphic depiction. Here are the contours of the historic transfer from one colonial regime to another and the passage into the ”American century,” presented with theoretical sophistication and in lucid, engaging prose. Step into this world and walk through it with this highly informed guide and you are sure to emerge more knowledgeable and critically sensitive to the many issues and challenges that have confronted the “Great Puerto Rican family,” including and highlighting its long-ignored Black stepchildren, while gaining a deft exposure to its rich photographic and artistic traditions.