Archipelagoes of Longing: Puerto Ricans, Resistance, and Memory

Examines how Puerto Rican visual and literary culture on the island and in the diaspora responds to oppression, migration, and trauma. Archipelagoes of Longing brings together a broad range of cultural materials to rearticulate Puerto Rican experience as one of connectedness through and despite dispersal. Drawing on Eduard Glissant’s Archipelagic Thinking and José Esteban Muñoz’s Queer Utopias, Nicolás Ramos Flores presents Archipelagoes of Longing as a framework for analyzing how murals, commemorative sites, testimonios, and documentary films manifest various forms of longing – for lost pasts, for equality and stability, and, ultimately, for Puerto Rican liberation. Distinctive in its analysis of works produced in the diaspora and on the island, the book shows how collective memory, desire, and resistance shape projections of Puerto Rican futures in the face of continued devastation, displacement, and trauma. From street art in Chicago and Philadelphia to the Pulse Nightclub memorial in Orlando to literary and cinematic reckonings with environmental disasters and neoliberal policies, Ramos Flores traces a map of longing and hope for real change rooted in shared colonial history.