Imaging The Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century [Paperback]

In this book, Hilda Llor?ns offers a ground-breaking study of imagesphotographs, postcards, paintings, posters, and filmsabout 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 Llor?ns 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, Llor?ns 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.Hilda Llor?ns, PhD, is a faculty member in the Sociology and Anthropology department at the University of Rhode Island.

Drawing on photographs and works of art, Llor?ns explores the representations of Puerto Rican people during 'the American century' and the sociopolitical dimensions of those representations. She develops these argl3