Chapter 14: Ricanness: Enduring time in anticolonial performance

Abstract

Sandra Ruiz begins her extraordinary book Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance by seriously taking up Laura Briggs’s enticing provocation that “Puerto Rico is the most important place in the world.” That is, Puerto Rico for Ruiz is an exemplary site to “detangle the threads of modern globalization and the incessant desires for colonialism” (p. 1), a project that has only gained more urgency in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria’s unspeakable devastation of the island in 2017. This aftermath of course was marked by the failures of the United States government, as well as the international community, to support Puerto Rico as it once again became the site of necropolitical ravages facilitated by its ongoing colonial condition. While Ricanness does not focus explicitly on this aftermath, it cannot help but haunt its pages, lingering in the reader’s mind as a reminder of the material stakes of Ruiz’s project. But as she informs us, to speak of Puerto Rico is to confront the multiplicity of historical and contemporary violences that continue to determine everyday life and death on the island. Thus, to engage with the colonial condition of Puerto Rico is to enter a space where temporal distances become collapsed and ongoing, a record that is determined as much by history as by its continuous unfolding in the present.