Puerto Rico, one of the last and most populated colonial territories in the world, occupies a relatively unique position. Its lengthy interaction with the United States has resulted in the long-term acquisition of expanded legal rights and relative political stability. At the same time, that interaction has simultaneously seen political intolerance and the denial of basic rights, particularly toward those who have challenged colonialism. In Puerto Rico under Colonial Rule, academics and intellectuals from the fields of political science, history, sociology, and law examine three themes: evidence of state-sponsored political persecution in the twentieth century, contemporary issues, and the case of Vieques.

The rapid economic changes in post-World War II Korea are often described as "miraculous." Indeed, the country is frequently posited as a model for other countries to emulate. Yet few social or economic historians have seriously examined the roots of these dramatic changes. Edwin Gragert, in this analysis of landownership patterns during the final years of the Yi dynasty, contends that economic changes relevant to Korea's current prosperity long predate the postwar Period; indeed, factors influencing these changes were in place even prior to the twentieth century. A landmark in the study of socioeconomic change in modern Korea, Landownership under Colonial Rule stands firm in its revision of the nationalist thesis about Japanese land expropriation during the colonial period. The meticulous research offers the most detailed and complex view of the late Choson and colonial landholding system available in English. It reveals striking new evidence that acquisition came at a much later date, the result of market forces during the worldwide depression years. Despite having a policy of massive settlement of Japanese citizens and plans for economic exploitation and transformation of the Korean peninsula, Imperial Japan was frustrated by social, economic, and political forces already at work in Korea. Dr. Gragert opens new approaches to research on the colonial period and provides a fresh perspective on modern Korean and Japanese history.

Puerto Rico has been an "unincorporated territory" of the United States for over a century. For much of that time, the archipelago has been mostly invisible to US residents and neglected by the government. However, a series of crises in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, from outsized debt to climate fueled disasters, have led to massive protests and brought Puerto Rico greater visibility. Monica A. Jimenez argues that to fully understand how and why Puerto Rico finds itself in this current moment of precarity, we must look to a larger history of US settler colonialism and racial exclusion in law. The federal policies and jurisprudence that created Puerto Rico exist within a larger pantheon of exclusionary, race-based laws and policies that have carved out "states of exception" for racial undesirables: Native Americans, African Americans, and the inhabitants of the insular territories. This legal regime has allowed the federal government plenary or complete power over these groups. Jimenez brings these histories together to demonstrate that despite Puerto Rico's unique position as a twenty-first-century colony, its path to that place was not exceptional.

In The Colonization of Land in Matthew's Gospel, Maziel Barreto Dani proposes that land is constructed as a colonized and subjugated entitl. Traditional scholarship claims that the Gospel of Matthew is detached from spatial-territorial discussions and that geographical land concerns are displaced with Christology. Dani, however, reinterprets multiple implicit and explicit references to land in the Gospel to show continuity, rather than discontinuity, with the Hebrew Bible’s concerns with material land promises. She does so by engaging the Gospel within its broader Roman, Hellenistic, and Jewish contexts where the theme of land possession is pervasive. Central to the Gospel and the imperial contexts from which it emerges are contestations over the land and proclamations to whom the land belongs. Dani argues that while Judea and neighboring lands are under the firm control of Roman imperial power during the first century CE, Matthew’s Gospel envisions Rome’s demise and the control of land being transferred to an alternative empire governed by the sovereign rule of God. Though God liberates the land from Rome’s oppressive grasp and restores land promises to the righteous poor at Jesus’ return, the land fails to escape colonial control. That is, the world, while relinquished from Roman hegemony, is reasserted under God’s power and domination. In arguing that Matthew’s Gospel employs an imperializing agenda involving land reclamation, the Gospel may be a source for validating and justifying the modern colonization of foreign and occupied land under the guise of God’s purposes. The Colonization of Land in Matthew's Gospel challenges colonial ideologies which oppress not only peoples but the lands which they inhabit.

The Struggle of Non-Sovereign Caribbean Territories is an essay collection made up of two sections; in the first, a group of anglophone and francophone scholars examines the roots, effects and implications of the major social upheaval that shook Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in February and March of 2009. They clearly demonstrate the critical role played by community activism, art and media to combat politico-economic policies that generate (un)employment, labor exploitation, and unattended health risks, all made secondary to the supremacy of profit. In the second section, additional scholars provide in-depth analyses of the ways in which an insistence on capital accumulation and centralization instantiated broad hierarchies of market-driven profit, capital accumulation, and economic exploitation upon a range of populations and territories in the wider non-sovereign and nominally sovereign Caribbean from Haiti to the Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico, reinforcing the racialized patterns of socioeconomic exclusion and privatization long imposed by France on its former colonial territories.

Made in Puerto Rico: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive introduction to the history, culture, and musicology of 20th and 21st century popular music in Puerto Rico. The essays in this volume, written by both local experts and leading scholars, contextualize under-researched areas of Puerto Rican popular music-making in relation to ideologies, aesthetics, and symbolism, and propose new ways of thinking about Puerto Rican musical cultures. A groundbreaking introduction to Puerto Rican musical culture, the volume covers the major figures, styles, and social contexts of popular music in Puerto Rico, while also going beyond conventional narratives. Rather than simply providing histories of key genres, these insightful essays focus on the ways in which Puerto Rican musicians reimagine their distinctive musical language as it transmutes from local practices into global expressions. Offering both a survey of Puerto Rican popular music and pathways into deeper critical inquiry, Made in Puerto Rico is an essential resource for scholars and students of music and of Puerto Rican, Caribbean, Latin American, and African Diaspora Studies.

Unequal Sisters has become a beloved and classic reader, providing an unparalleled resource for understanding women’s history in the United States today. First published in 1990, the book revolutionized the field with its broad multicultural approach, emphasizing feminist perspectives on race, ethnicity, region, and sexuality, and covering the colonial period to the present day. Now in its fifth edition, the book presents an even wider variety of women’s experiences. This new edition explores the connections between the past and the present and highlights the analysis of queerness, transgender identity, disability, the rise of the carceral state, and the bureaucratization and militarization of migration. There is also more coverage of Indigenous and Pacific Islander women. The book is structured around thematic clusters: conceptual/methodological approaches to women’s history; bodies, sexuality, and kinship; and agency and activism. This classic work has incorporated the feedback of educators in the field to make it the most user-friendly version to date and will be of interest to students and scholars of women’s history, gender and sexuality studies, and the history of race and ethnicity.

This book addresses the complex issue of incarceration of Latino/as and offers a comprehensive overview of such topics as deportations in historical context, a case study of latino/a resistance to prisons in the 70s, the issues of youth and and girls prisons, and the post incarceration experience.

The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party (PNPR) understood that to successfully establish an independent nation it needed to generate solidarity across the Americas with its struggle against US colonial rule. It invested significant energy, personnel, and resources in attending regional conferences, distributing its literature throughout the hemisphere, creating solidarity committees, presenting its case to elected officials and the general public, and promoting the causes of oppressed peoples. The hemispheric outpourings of solidarity with Puerto Rican independence have been obscured by larger, later liberation movements as well as the anticolonial party's ultimate failure to achieve independence. However, as this book shows, they were nonetheless central to anti-imperialists, nationalists, and revolutionaries from New York City to Buenos Aires. Margaret M. Power's new history of the PNPR focuses on how it built a broad movement with active networks in virtually all of Latin America, much of the Caribbean, and New York City. This hemispheric view introduces a sprawling transnational network, nurtured by the PNPR from its founding in 1922 through its military actions of the 1950s and beyond that included individuals, parties, organizations, and governments throughout the Americas, and it resituates the Puerto Rican nationalist movement as a transnational revolutionary influence and force.