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Interrogating The Future of Puerto Rican Studies brings together emerging and established scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine the disciplinary and epistemic transformations that have given way to new understandings of the field of Puerto Rican studies. Documenting the intellectual contours that have shaped the field of Puerto Rican Studies in the last decade, a diverse range of contributors survey the field with new lenses that are attentive to gender, queerness, disability, and Blackness among other things. A foreword by Yarimar Bonilla situates the volume in the context of the field’s shift, specifically in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, while other sections, including “Queering Puerto Rican Studies,” “Centering Blackness,” and “Disaster Studies and Environmental Studies,” as well as “Puerto Rican Studies in Broader Fields of Knowledges,” “Prefigurative Politics and Social Movements,” and “Legal and Political Disruptions,” create a vibrant archive of conversations taking place within the field of Puerto Rican studies with the aim of interrogating its future.

Contributors. José Atiles, Bárbara Abadía Rexach, Yarimar Bonilla, daniela crespo-miró, Marie Cruz Soto, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, Marcela Guerrero, Gustavo García López, Mónica Jiménez, Lawrence LaFountain Stokes, Marisol LeBrón, Pedro Lebrón Ortiz, Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, Sarah Molinari, Marisel Moreno, Daniel Nevárez Araújo, Aurora Santiago Ortiz, Karrieann Soto Vega, Daniel Vázquez Sanabria, Roberto Vélez-Vélez, Joaquín Villanueva, Jacqueline Villarrubia-Mendoza

In The Lettered Barriada, Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo tells the story of how a cluster of self-educated workers burst into Puerto Rico's world of letters and navigated the colonial polity that emerged out of the 1898 US occupation. They did so by asserting themselves as citizens, producers of their own historical narratives, and learned minds. Disregarded by most of Puerto Rico's intellectual elite, these workers engaged in dialogue with international peers and imagined themselves as part of a global community. They also entered the world of politics through the creation of the Socialist Party, which became an electoral force in the first half of the twentieth century. Meléndez-Badillo shows how these workers produced, negotiated, and deployed powerful discourses that eventually shaped Puerto Rico's national mythology. By following these ragtag intellectuals as they became politicians and statesmen, Meléndez-Badillo also demonstrates how they engaged in racial and gender silencing, epistemic violence, and historical erasures in the fringes of society. Ultimately, The Lettered Barriada is about the politics of knowledge production and the tensions between working-class intellectuals and the state.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient