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"The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race--created to overcome U.S. colonial power--simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism. Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a Hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black. Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture"--

ABSTRACTUsing the concept of "racecraft" to describe the state production of racial subjectivities, we argue that this process has been increasingly compromised in Puerto Rico by a lack of sovereignty and by the current socioeconomic crisis. We argue that the state‐sponsored idea that Puerto Rican white and mixed‐race identities operate separately from the US racial framework is receding. Based on the unconventional use of an open‐ended question for racial identification in a survey administered to over one thousand Puerto Ricans, we found: a reluctance to identify racially, an awareness of a normative "whiteness" that excludes Puerto Ricans, and a tendency to embrace US federal categories such as "Hispanic" and "Latino." We interpret these results as evidence of a Puerto Rican racial state in decline, arguing that the island's debt crisis and compounding disasters have not only eroded the political and economic realms of statecraft but the racial one as well. [census, colonialism, race, identity, statecraft, racial state, Puerto Rico]

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Globalization and the Transformations of Race -- PART I DIASPORIC MOVEMENTS, MISSIONS, AND MODERNITIES -- Missionary Positions -- History at the Crossroads: Vodú and the Modernization of the Dominican Borderlands -- Diaspora and Desire: Gendering ''Black America'' in Black Liverpool -- Diaspora Space, Ethnographic Space: Writing History Between the Lines -- ''Mama, I'm Walking to Canada'': Black Geopolitics and Invisible Empires -- PART II GEOGRAPHIES OF RACIAL BELONGING -- Mapping Transnationality: Roots Tourism and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Heritage -- Emigration and the Spatial Production of Difference from Cape Verde -- Folkloric ''Others'': Blanqueamiento and the Celebration of Blackness as an Exception in Puerto Rico -- Gentrification, Globalization, and Georaciality -- Recasting ''Black Venus'' in the ''New'' African Diaspora -- ''Shooting the White Girl First'': Race in Post-apartheid South Africa -- PART III POPULAR BLACKNESSES, ''AUTHENTICITY,'' AND NEW MEASURES OF LEGITIMACY -- Havana's Timba: A Macho Sound for Black Sex -- Reading Bu√y and ''Looking Proper'': Race, Gender, and Consumption among West Indian Girls in Brooklyn -- The Homegrown: Rap, Race, and Class in London -- Racialization, Gender, and the Negotiation of Power in Stockholm's African Dance Courses -- Modern Blackness: Progress, ''America,'' and the Politics of Popular Culture in Jamaica -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index