Yeidy Rivero's "Tuning Out Blackness" - Puerto Rican TV, Race, Racism & National Identity

"Donde esta tu abuela" (where is your Grandmother?), mis Latinos... The following book title and its subject remind me of a time when I studied Spanish with a certain international organisation. The teacher used videos intended to depict "Puerto Rican culture" and a "typical" Puerto Rican family. Problem was, not one member of the 'family' cast was Afro Puerto Rican. This is absolutely counter-intuitive to what some of us know about who Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rican communities truly are. Yeidy Rivero's refreshingly related new book is titled Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television. It's published by Duke University Press (North Carolina USA). Rivero is assistant prof in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana (in the quite racist Midwest USA). I will never forget those JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY billboards I used to see in Indiana. And all you italiani who so love Latin culture and music when they come to Italia for a month every summer - while at the same time showing such solidarieta per l'Africa yet only when it's completely disconnected from the African/Black Americas - Italians might learn a few things if they take heed. On the Duke University Press website: "Tuning Out Blackness fills a glaring omission in U.S. and Latin American television studies by looking at the history of Puerto Rican television. In exploring the political and cultural dynamics that have shaped racial representations in Puerto Rico's commercial media from the late 1940s to the 1990s, Yeidy M. Rivero advances critical discussions about race, ethnicity, and the media. She shows that televisual representations of race have belied the racial egalitarianism that allegedly pervades Puerto Rico's national culture. White performers in blackface have often portrayed “blackness” in local television productions, while black actors have been largely excluded. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and textual analysis, Rivero considers representations of race in Puerto Rico, taking into account how they are intertwined with the island's status as a U.S. commonwealth, its national culture, and its relationship with Cuba before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the massive influx of Cuban migrants after 1960. She focuses on locally produced radio and television shows, particular television events, and characters that became popular media icons—from performer Ramón Rivero's use of blackface and “black” voice in the 1940s and 1950s to the battle between black actors and television industry officials over racism in the 1970s to the creation, in the 1990s, of the first Puerto Rican situation comedy featuring a black family. As the twentieth century drew to a close, multinational corporations had purchased all of Puerto Rico's stations, and they threatened to wipe out locally produced programs. Tuning Out Blackness not only brings to the forefront the marginalization of non-white citizens in Puerto Rico's media culture; it also raises important questions about the significance of local sites of television production. “This book not only provides a cultural history of 'blackness' in Puerto Rican television, it also locates Puerto Rico as a critical blind spot in both Latin American and U.S. television studies, one that can offer new insights into the televisual representation of race, family, and nation.”-Chon Noriega, author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema; “Tuning Out Blackness offers an astute and very well informed analysis of Puerto Rico's unique 'racial' programming, which in turn provides a valuable look at the deep ambivalence at the heart of the country's sense of national identity in the shadow of U.S. ideological and cultural power.”-Juan Flores, author of From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latin Identity. See more reviews here. The book's contents: Acknowledgments; Introduction: Translating Televisual “Blackness”; 1. Caribbean Negritos: Ramon Rivero, Blackface, and Black Voice in Puerto Rico; 2. Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and the Resurgent Popularity of Blackface; 3. The CubaRican Space Revisited; 4. Mi familia: A Black Puerto Rican Televisual Family; 5. Translating and Representing Blackness; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Comments

[Abdul-Halim]

Yes. Thanks for letting me know about this book. It's going on my shopping list.