scholarly journals Puerto Rico, Colonialism, and Neocolonialism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gibran Cruz-Martinez

This essay aims to briefly collect the historical context of colonialism in Puerto Rico since the Spanish era but primarily focuses on revealing the reasons to consider Puerto Rico as a colony and non-self-governing territory of the US – rather than a neocolony of the US. Later, the article addresses the three non-colonial options recognized by the 1514 United Nations (UN) Resolution and the results of the five referendums on the political status of the Caribbean archipelago held over the last five decades. The essay concludes that Puerto Rico is undoubtedly a colony and asks for the United Nations and the sovereign countries of the world to denounce this illegal colonial relationship that subordinates residents of Puerto Rico to the will of the US Congress where they have no voting representatives.

Significance Over 6,000 state-level officials were elected on November 6. The results matter for state-level policy and the federal-level political conversation it influences, and for the political arithmetic of future elections. Impacts California especially will attempt to create a parallel policy track to that occurring in Washington. The Florida and Arizona Senate races face recounts; these would not change control of the US Congress in 2019. By 2020, pressure is likely to have grown for Puerto Rico and Washington DC to gain greater representation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 176-215
Author(s):  
Marilisa Jiménez García

This chapter contextualizes the contemporary era of youth literature and media in Puerto Rico and its diaspora, both those in the US and those returning to Puerto Rico. Looking at the 1980s into 2010s, this chapter analyzes the role of youth literature and culture in Puerto Rico’s contemporary struggles, including its economic crisis, public debt, the devastation of Hurricane Maria, and the political uprising which led to the resignation of former Governor Ricardo Rosello. Puerto Rican storytellers continue narrating Puerto Rico’s contemporary frontline struggles, from Broadway to comics to community-organized story times and children’s books.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-315
Author(s):  
Simon(e) Van Saarloos

David Buckel set himself on fire to publicly stage the horrors of climate change, Delores “Lolita” Lebrón performed a sensational act in the US congress hall, hailing bullets while calling out: ¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!When do we recognize violence as violence? When is the absence of a counter-attack a form of compliance? Do the desires of activists need an expression of violence to establish an ‘otherwise’ that’s carefully repressed? In “Blow your mind! Shards hailing, on superfluous violence to stop surviving” various instances of violence weave together, obscuring the difference between theatre, terrorism, assault and sensational act.The end of the world is a future for those who have been living like survivors. To explore the potential of violence as resistance, the author proposes to fight as an armless aimless army of vulnerables.‘Violence happens upon you. But that’s not really true for everyone. As a white cis-woman with passport privilege, I can say I’m interested in violence. Interested in, interested in. Violence doesn’t surround me. It may happen to me, but I would perceive it as an extraordinary event, a happening. I approach violence. I approach, I approach – there’s enough comfortable distance to repeat my sentence and imagine it echoing.’ 


Author(s):  
Emma Simone

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.


2021 ◽  
pp. 263300242110244
Author(s):  
Alice M. Greenwald ◽  
Clifford Chanin ◽  
Henry Rousso ◽  
Michel Wieviorka ◽  
Mohamed-Ali Adraoui

How do societies and states represent the historical, moral, and political weight of the terrorist attacks they have had to face? Having suffered in recent years from numerous terrorist attacks on their soil originating from jihadist movements, and often led by actors who were also their own citizens, France and the United States have set up—or seek to do so—places of memory whose functions, conditions of creation, modes of operation, and nature of the messages sent may vary. Three of the main protagonists and initiators of two museum-memorial projects linked to terrorist attacks have agreed to deliver their visions of the role and of the political, social, and historical context in which these projects have emerged. Allowing to observe similarities and differences between the American and French approach, this interview sheds light on the place of memory and feeling in societies struck by tragic events and seeking to cure their ills through memory and commemoration.


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Franceschet

The United Nations ad hoc tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had primacy over national judicial agents for crimes committed in these countries during the most notorious civil wars and genocide of the 1990s. The UN Charter granted the Security Council the right to establish a tribunal for Yugoslavia in the context of ongoing civil war and against the will of recalcitrant national agents. The Council used that same right to punish individuals responsible for a genocide that it failed earlier to prevent in Rwanda. In both cases the Council delegated a portion of its coercive title to independent tribunal agents, thereby overriding the default locus of punishment in the world order: sovereign states.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danilo T Perez-Rivera ◽  
Christopher Torres Lugo ◽  
Alexis R Santos-Lozada

Between July 13-24, 2019 the people of Puerto Rico took the streets after a series of corruption scandals shocked the political establishment. The social uprising resulted in the ousting of the Governor of Puerto Rico (Dr. Ricardo Rosselló, Ricky), the resignation of the majority of his staff something unprecedented in the history of Puerto Rico; this period has been called El Verano del 19 (Summer of 19). Social media played a crucial role in both the organization and dissemination of the protests, marches, and other activities that occurred within this period. Puerto Ricans in the island and around the world engaged in this social movement through the digital revolution mainly under the hashtag #RickyRenuncia (Ricky Resign), with a small counter movement under the hashtag #RickySeQueda (Ricky will stay). The purpose of this study is to illustrate the magnitude and grass roots nature of the political movement’s social media presence, as well as their characteristics of the population of both movements and their structures. We found that #RickyRenuncia was used approximately one million times in the period of analysis while #RickySeQueda barely reached 6,000 tweets. Particularly, the pervasiveness of cliques in the #RickySeQueda show concentrations of authority dedicated to its propagation, whilst the #RickyRenuncia propagation was much more distributed and decentralized with little to no interaction between significant nodes of authority. Noteworthy was the role of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States of America and around the world, contributing close to 40% of all geo-located tweets. Finally, we found that the Twitter followers of the former governor had indicators of being composed of two distinct populations: 1) those active in social media and 2) those who follow the account but who are not active participants of the social network. We discuss the implications of these findings on the interpretation of emergence, structure and dissemination of social activism and countermovement to these activities in the context of Puerto Rico.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Fuentes-Luque ◽  
Pabsi Livmar González-Irizarry

Even though Audiovisual Translation (AVT) is growing and flourishing throughout the world, it is practically unheard-of in the Caribbean, where accessibility faces an even bleaker existence. The circumstances of the deaf and hard of hearing (also referred to as D/deaf) are no less alarming: social barriers and exclusion are widespread. This paper emphasizes the need to make subtitles accessible in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, specifically on the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and underscores the challenges faced by the D/deaf communities on each island. Our research focuses on issues like AVT laws and regulations, the habits of viewers of audiovisual (AV) products, and literacy and limitations on each island. This paper also examines the different types of D/deaf audiovisual consumers in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and the difficulties each community faces when accessing media and entertainment. Our research reveals the current state of AVT accessibility in this region and provides a foundation for influencing legislators to begin enforcing AVT regulations and drafting SDH guidelines.


Author(s):  
Hélène Domon

It is time that universities reexamine what is meant by globalization. Contemporary researchers in science and the humanities (Critchley, Chomsky, Mumford, Ostrom, Eisenstein, Ferry, Orr, Shiva, Klein, Margulis, Meadows, Capra and Tolba, just to name a few) have aptly redefined the concept of « world » as a biological and cultural ecosystem. This paper seeks ways to integrate the theory and practice of eco-citizenship into various cross-disciplinary aspects of higher education, with a focus on curricular adjustments that may be steered by World Languages and Cultures programs. While "global citizenship" is still often understood today as a form of supranational citizenship that may find its actualization through the valuable, yet often arrested efforts of the United Nations, or as the individualistic result of a neoliberal economic emancipation of markets and capital throughout the world, this notion must rather be embedded within a radically cultural, natural and ethical bedrock from which a more potent world citizenry will stem. Departments of World Languages and Cultures and cultures are ideally positioned in the academic landscape to foster the development of a greater eco-civic and biospheric awareness that can permeate new curricular orientations of universities in the US and abroad.


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