Laura Briggs Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperial

Laura Briggs Reproducing Empire Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto anti-racketeering lawIn Reproducing Empire, Laura Briggs provides her readers with a truly thorough invoice of the mainland U.S. and Puerto Rican discourses and its authors surrounding Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, from Puerto Ricos formation in the mainland elites mind as a model U.S. (not) colony in 1898* to its present status as semi-autonomous U.S.territory. Briggs opens her book by discussing the origins of globalization in U.S. and western European colonialism, and closes with a review of her methods, in which she calls for a new focus on subaltern studies, including a (re)focus on the authors of information (who she claims as the subjects of this book) as a lens by which to circumvent the neglect and obsessive interestin the service of the imperial find out in Puerto Rico (207). Briggs identifies herself in her epilogue- I am a US. Anglo whose ties to the island are only love and a re lentless sense that that just as the history of the island is inescapably tied to the mainland, so the mainlands history is reciprocally tied to the island (206). Briggs notes that there is an active history of dissociation of Puerto Rico as part of the U.S., and that to speak only of Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico as true Puerto Ricans, or to construct Puerto Rico as economically unconnected to the U.S. is a misconception, which has been historically employed to blame Puerto Rico for the U.S. subordination of it. Briggs records Puerto Ricos history as a model, testing site, or laboratory for U.S. colonial rule, centering on the ways in which this has functioned in relation to or through (control of) Puerto Rican working class women an... ... note that island organizations that supported birth control for other reasons often utilized funding from these larger foundations.*****While Briggs condemns the stance of most base of operations to conservative mainland organizations in terms of the sterilization/anti-sterilization debate, she notes at length the ways in which a variety of Puerto Rican activists, such as the Young Lords, circumvented the racist cultivation of poverty notes and the dominant tendency to deny agency to their subjects in their political activism outside of this debate. Her judgments on the subject of engagement with a culture of poverty argument are complex, as are the usefulness of deciding what activism is better from her perspective as an academic outsider. I will return to this in terms of the authority usefulness of the intersections between internal and (external?) colonial theory.