Imaging The Great Puerto Rican Family

Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century

By (author) Hilda Lloréns

Publication date:

30 October 2014

Length of book:

290 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739189184

In this book, 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

Drawing on photographs and works of art, Lloréns explores the representations of Puerto Rican people during 'the American century' and the sociopolitical dimensions of those representations. She develops these arguments using current and popular theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Alfred Gell, and Susan Sontag, and appropriately references contributions from Puerto Rican scholars fairly thoroughly. These qualities contribute to the potential value of the work in broadening recognition of the Puerto Rican experience among scholars in anthropology, art history, and politics of representation, for example. . . .Lloréns' work here is . . . commendable for scholarly audiences, to whom the material is likely to be unfamiliar, and accessible for use at the advanced college level and above. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.