Puerto Rico: A U.S. Colony in a Post-Colonial World?
Issue number 128 (June 2017)
Abstract Deadline: September 1, 2015
Issue editors: Margaret Power and Andor Skotnes
It is time to revisit the nature, meanings, and understandings of Puerto Rico’s and Puerto Ricans’ political, economic, social, cultural, and demographic relationship to the United States and Latin America. Puerto Rico, a United States colony for close to 115 years, is sinking into another period of decline. Poverty is deepening, politics are in disarray, and emigration is again on the rise. The long, multifaceted resistance movement of the Puerto Rican people is in a period of reorientation. In this issue of the RHR, the editors want to cast a wide net, and address Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the U.S. Empire from a variety of angles. In this context, it makes sense to raise a number of questions, including:
- What does nationality, nationalism, and the questions of statehood, commonwealth or independence mean for Puerto Rico and for Puerto Ricans in the diaspora in the current period?
- What stake do the U.S. government and economic elites have in maintaining Puerto Rico as its colony, as a component of its global empire?
- What does it mean that more Puerto Ricans live in the mainland United States than on the island, and that there is an increasing stream of non-Puerto Rican immigrants to the island?
- How has the reconfigured geopolitical context impacted Puerto Rican identity and prospects for liberation—and what might that liberation now look like?
- How do we understand the economic, political, and cultural relationships of Puerto Rico to the United States, to the rest of the Caribbean, and to Latin America?
- How do configurations of race and racial identity, and gendered and sexual identity among Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland coalesce or conflict with nationalism, statehood, and the commonwealth?
- What are the current configurations of political forces in Puerto Rico and among Puerto Ricans, and what prospects do they hold for women’s struggles, for the workers and environmental movements, for overall social transformation?
- What does the present state of Puerto Rican nationhood and nationalism suggest about oppositional and liberations movements in the United States, the hemisphere, and worldwide?
Each issue of RHR (including issue 128) publishes material in a variety of forms. Potential contributors are encouraged to look at recent issues for examples of both conventional and non-conventional forms of scholarship. The editors are especially interested in submissions that use images as well as texts and encourage materials with strong visual content. In addition to monographic articles based on archival research, the editors encourage submissions to our various departments, including:
- Historians at Work (reflective essays by practitioners in academic and non-academic settings that engage with questions of professional practice)
- Teaching Radical History (syllabi and commentary on teaching)
- Public History (essays on historical commemoration and the politics of the past)
- Interviews (proposals for interviews with scholars, activists, and others)
- (Re)Views (review essays on history in all media–print, film, and digital)
Procedures for submission of articles: By September 1, 2015, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish as an attachment to contactrhr@gmail.com with “Issue 128 Abstract Submission” in the subject line. By October 31, 2015, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for full-length article submissions will be February 15, 2016.
Articles should be submitted electronically with “Issue 128 Submission” in the subject line. Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or TIFF files at a minimum of 300 dpi) and secure permission to reprint all images. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 128 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in June 2017.