Laura Briggs Reproducing Empire Race, Sex, Science, and...

Laura Briggs Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico In Reproducing Empire, Laura Briggs provides her readers with a very thorough history 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†¦show more content†¦The stories she reports and critiques are characterized by 1) a fundamental circumvention of agency for the appropriated test subjects--primarily, working class Puerto Rican women and the placing of all blame for social problems upon them; 2) though she doesnt name it as such, a historical employment of misconceptions of genetics and hereditary in exerting control over colonized subjects, the poor, and womens reproductive and sexual histories**; all of this located in a transition away from frank colonialism (198). This is also a story of the displacement of poverty caused by colonialism onto disease, difference, over-population, and the need for public health regulation from the mainland U.S among others Briggs historiography of the enslavement of working class Puerto Rican women to experimentation intersects with and was part of the formation of racialized ideologies of disease, which were used to construct the racial, social and political difference between Puerto Ricans and white Americans and to control Puerto Rican working class women, in a context of explaining away U.S exploitation of the island and constructing Puerto Rico as the reason why the U.S. is a benevolent international force.*** In the 19th century, this was discussed primarily in relation to Puerto Rican sex workers, in the 20th century it focused on reproductive control. In the 19th century,