Seams of Empire
Race and Radicalism in Puerto Rico and the United States

Carlos Alamo-Pastrana (Author)

9780813064253

Paperback / softback, published 7 May 2019

232 pages, 11 black & white photographs
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.355 kg

Provides a significant contribution to the growing scholarship of diasporic studies and multiracial coalitions. Anybody interested in the overlapping histories of antiracist and anticolonial movements should read this book."" - American Historical Review

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.