Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama by Jon D Rossini (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama by Jon D Rossini
• Camilla Stevens (bio)

Jon D Rossini. Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024. Pp. 254. $75.00 hardback, $29.95 paperback, eBook open access.

Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama illuminates how Puerto Rican playwrights writing in the United States are thinking through an emancipatory practical politics in response to enduring colonialism, systemic racism, and inequity. Assembling a corpus of play texts from mainly the last three decades, Rossini identifies how Puerto Rican diasporic drama offers a critique of the status quo framing of the Puerto Rican political status debate, as well as a critique of the costs of violent revolution. In different ways, the staged stories Rossini attends to suggest pragmatic moves and positions that shape action toward sustainable and enduring liberation. Pragmatic Liberation thus serves as a meditation on the power of dramaturgical writing in producing theoretical reflections on political action, while at the same time it provides a genealogy of contemporary Puerto Rican drama written in the United States.

The book addresses an impressive range of over a dozen dramatists. Rossini does the important work of recognizing the foundational impact of pioneers such as René Marqués and Miriam Colón on the development of mainland Puerto Rican drama; he includes the better-known Puerto Rican playwrights in the contemporary Latine theatre landscape—José Rivera, Migdalia Cruz, and Carmen Rivera; and he incorporates newer voices such as Nelson Díaz-Marcano, Kristoffer Díaz, and Desi Moreno-Penson as well. Last but not least, the manuscript engages consistently with perhaps the most important current voice in U.S. Puerto Rican dramaturgy: Quiara Alegría Hudes.

Rossini draws upon a wide range of thinkers from the fields of dramatic theory and criticism, politics, and Puerto Rican Studies. The introduction and conclusion are lively bookends and offer provocative examples that help prepare the reader’s engagement with the study’s theoretical framing. Rossini argues that Puerto Rican playwrights in the United States speak “from a complex, explicitly structured set of political marginalities” (5) and use drama “to trace pathways toward real change, the complex ambivalence and conversations that are necessary to advance thinking and begin the movement toward forms of emancipation while continuing to sustain life” (5). Rossini convincingly argues that dramaturgical writing is particularly well suited for envisioning change because it is predicated on acknowledging the “given circumstances” that condition the creation of the world of the play. Outside this fictional frame, he claims that recognizing our given circumstances is essential in the process of envisioning paths toward sustainable change. Drama thus “serves as an ideal form to understand that authentically [End Page 495] moving forward in a sustained mode of political resistance requires recognizing the limits of transformation and the spaces in which one can intervene. This is the form of political thinking I call pragmatic liberation” (7).

Rossini’s notion of pragmatic politics harmonizes with philosophical approaches to resistance articulated in Puerto Rican studies. Beyond the moment of radical action and revolt, which can risk terminal violence, Rossini is interested in the afterlife and everyday actions where actors maneuver within the given circumstances of U.S.-Puerto Rico political relationality. He links pragmatism to two autochthonous concepts, jaibería and bregar, developed in response to the power asymmetries of colonialism. The mountain crab’s winding forward movement made by moving sidewise is called jaibería, a metaphor for non-confrontational negotiation and transformation. Similarly, bregar can be understood as “a particular mode of conversational negotiation and making do” (21). For Rossini, “bregar models a crucial strategy, not passive acceptance, but an active decision to minimize violence when possible. This is not repudiating revolutionary action, but rather acknowledging that the material conditions of colonialism persist” (23). Throughout the study, Rossini insists that these strategies do not represent a position of complacency; rather, they constitute a deliberate engagement with the political relationality of politics that we can see play out in imaginative theatrical explorations of the possibilities for transformation.

The ordering of the five main body chapters and...