Seeing the World through a Puerto Rican Lens: Decolonial Critique in Boricua Beats

This review essay of Rocio Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) argues that it is a book about contemporary Puerto Rico and its world-historical significance that engages this endeavor with depth and breath, carefully crafting its own argument, through the lens of Puerto Rico’s colonial crisis as symptomatic of a global crisis of neoliberal capitalism, by means of an analytics of debt as a central feature of capitalist modernity. Rather than simply presenting the book, the essay critically addresses several interwoven questions that are key to its argument. The author introduces the general theoretical framework and presents specific historical and social accounts, then pursues a path from the laying-out of the analytical gaze to specifying the political posture. It discusses the book’s contributions to decolonial critique, Marxism, the analytics of debt, and the dialectics of life and death in capitalist modernity and moves on to assessing its radical politics of decolonization and decoloniality.