This review essay of Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) illustrates Zambrana’s own intervention into “race/gender/class” hierarchies as carrying their own relations of power within her rewriting of the “plantation complex,” using the colony of Puerto Rico as case study. This intervention, the author speculates, moves the book’s analysis into a more intramural critique where Zambrana centers an interrogation of the “vitality” of the “laboratory” that is the factory, or of the plantation economy as the materialized prefiguration for financialized capital on the colony. Zambrana’s move here, the author asserts, then provokes her to name anti-Blackness as the foundation for the structural mechanisms (racial order) that sediment the ability to be an indebted subject, or at least experience an enclosure within the structural comfort of national belonging.
The Precarity of Intramural Theorizing
Judith Rodríguez is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender Studies and the Latino Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in transdisciplinary approaches to Black and Afro-Latina feminism and literary and performance theory. Her first manuscript, titled “Impositions: The Aesthetic Blackening of Puerto Ricanness,” explores works of literature, music, documentary film, and theater and performance since the 1930s that have critiqued—and imagined alternatives to—the gendered anti-Black violence produced through the imposition of ethnonational discourse on the colony and its diaspora.
Judith Rodríguez; The Precarity of Intramural Theorizing. Small Axe 1 July 2024; 28 (2 (74)): 179–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-11382595
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