Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama

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Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama

by Jon D. Rossini

University of Michigan Press, 2024

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07672-7

Paper: 978-0-472-05672-9

eISBN: 978-0-472-90441-9 (OA)

About the Book

Finalist: 2025 ATHE Outstanding Book Award | July 21, 2025
Finalist: 2025 ATDS John W. Frick Book Award | July 16, 2025

Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama explores the work of a unique group of playwrights—Puerto Rican dramatists writing in the United States—who offer a model of political engagement. As members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, they have a heightened awareness of the systematic discrimination and the colonial citizenship created by Puerto Rico’s territorial status. Pragmatic Liberation analyzes the work of established playwrights as well as work that has previously received little attention in the world of theater studies, including René Marqués’s Palm Sunday. The book demonstrates the strategies these playwrights use to model a nuanced way of moving toward liberation while being sensitive to the potential impact these actions might have on those closest to us. This is a crucially important model that needs more attention in our currently polarized political moment.

About the Author

Jon D. Rossini is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance and Performance Studies, at the University of California, Davis.

Reviews

“In Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama, Jon D. Rossini approaches Puerto Rican dramatic storytelling as a rich source of nuanced thinking about political transformation. Rossini's book is an informative and elegant account of how Puerto Rican theater grapples with the dilemmas of revolutionary activism…Expansive in its thinking and grounded in the history and craft of Latinx theater, the book makes a sharp case for scripted theater's unique transformational capacities.”

— Modern Language Association Prize Citation

“An expansive analysis of recent Puerto Rican theater and a compelling critique of the role theater and art play in imagining and inspiring transformative political action. The author’s focus on pragmatic liberation underscores the limitations of the theater’s engagement with political discourse, as well as the indirect and decentralized forms of political action that have characterized PR decolonial activism...a significant contribution.”

— Israel Reyes, Dartmouth College

Finalist: 2025 ATHE Outstanding Book Award | July 21, 2025

— ATHE

"I recommend the introduction as a teachable essay for an undergraduate course and the monograph as a whole for anyone who wants to understand the intellectual contributions of Puerto Rican diasporic writers to the theorization of revolution, activism, and performance politics."— Latin American Theatre Review

Honorable Mention of the MLA Prize in United States Latino and Latina and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

— Modern Language Association

"Jon D. Rossini's Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama is not only a dazzlingly insightful book that reconceptualizes received histories of Latiné/x drama and performance but also one that radically reorients conventional logics about the glows of Puerto Rican diasporic thinking throughout the hemisphere."— Modern Drama

“This timely book explores how Puerto Rican playwrights are thinking through a practical politics in response to enduring colonialism, racism, and inequity. It serves as a meditation on the power of drama in producing theoretical reflections on political action; while at the same time it provides a genealogy of contemporary Puerto Rican diasporic drama. A welcome addition to literary studies of the Hispanic Caribbean diaspora, engaging with a genre that has generally been neglected.”

— Camilla Stevens, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

"Seeming to speak directly to a stressed, overwhelmed, and vulnerable readership, this book provides a needed perspective and comfort, grounded in historical context and political activist experiential knowledge, amid the ongoing cycle of feeling empowered or helpless depending on the day's media coverage. Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama looks not to immediate gratification, but to sustained resistance and lasting progress."— Latino Studies

"Pragmatic Liberation is a timely study that responds to the divisiveness that characterizes contemporary political discourse...Rossini's monograph will speak to scholars in fields ranging from Theatre Studies to English, Spanish, and Ethnic Studies, and it is a particularly welcome contribution to literary studies of the Hispanic Caribbean diaspora because it engages with a genre that has generally been neglected."— Comparative Drama

Finalist: 2025 ATDS John W. Frick Book Award | July 16, 2025

— ATDS