Reviewed by:

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

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...

 校订者：

• 
  乔恩·罗西尼 （Jon D Rossini） 的实用解放和波多黎各侨民政治戏剧
•  卡米拉·史蒂文斯 （生物）

实用解放和波多黎各侨民戏剧的政治阐明了在美国写作的波多黎各剧作家如何通过解放性的实践政治来应对持久的殖民主义、系统性种族主义和不平等。罗西尼主要汇集了过去三十年的戏剧文本，确定了波多黎各侨民戏剧如何对波多黎各政治地位辩论的现状框架进行批判，以及对暴力革命成本的批判。罗西尼以不同的方式参与舞台故事，以提出务实的举措和立场，以塑造可持续和持久解放的行动。因此，《务实解放》是对戏剧写作在对政治行动进行理论反思方面的力量的沉思，同时它提供了在美国创作的当代波多黎各戏剧的谱系。

这本书涉及十几位令人印象深刻的剧作家。罗西尼 （Rossini） 所做的重要工作是认识到 René Marqués 和 Miriam Colón 等先驱者对波多黎各大陆戏剧发展的基础性影响;他包括当代拉丁戏剧界更知名的波多黎各剧作家——何塞·里维拉、米格达利亚·克鲁兹和卡门·里维拉;他还融入了 Nelson Díaz-Marcano、Kristoffer Díaz 和 Desi Moreno-Penson 等新声音。最后但并非最不重要的一点是，该手稿始终与美国波多黎各戏剧构作中可能当前最重要的声音 Quiara Alegría Hudes 互动。

罗西尼借鉴了来自戏剧理论和批评、政治和波多黎各研究领域的广泛思想家。引言和结论是生动的书挡，并提供了挑衅性的例子，有助于读者为参与研究的理论框架做好准备。罗西尼认为，美国的波多黎各剧作家“从一系列复杂、结构明确的政治边缘性”出发“（5），并使用戏剧”追踪通往真正变革的途径，复杂的矛盾心理和对话，这些是推进思考和开始走向解放形式的运动所必需的，同时继续维持生命“（5）。罗西尼令人信服地指出，戏剧构作特别适合设想变化，因为它的前提是承认“给定的环境”是戏剧世界创造的条件。在这个虚构的框架之外，他声称，在设想通往可持续变革的道路的过程中，认识到我们的特定情况是必不可少的。因此，戏剧“是一种理想的形式，可以真正地理解 [完第 495 页] 在持续的政治抵抗模式中前进需要认识到变革的局限性和可以干预的空间。这就是我称之为务实解放的政治思维形式“（7）。

罗西尼的实用主义政治概念与波多黎各研究中阐述的抵抗哲学方法相一致。除了可能面临最终暴力风险的激进行动和反抗时刻之外，罗西尼还对演员在美国-波多黎各政治关系的特定情况下操纵的来世和日常行动感兴趣。他将实用主义与两个本土概念联系起来，即 jaibería 和 bregar，这两个概念是为应对殖民主义的权力不对称而发展起来的。山蟹通过侧向移动而做出的蜿蜒向前的运动被称为 jaibería，隐喻非对抗性的谈判和转变。同样，bregar 可以理解为“一种特殊的对话谈判和凑合模式”（21）。对罗西尼来说，“布雷加塑造了一个关键的策略，不是被动接受，而是尽可能减少暴力的主动决定。这并不是否认革命行动，而是承认殖民主义的物质条件仍然存在“（23）。在整个研究过程中，罗西尼坚持认为这些策略并不代表自满的立场;相反，它们构成了对政治政治关系的刻意参与，我们可以看到这种关系在对变革可能性的富有想象力的戏剧探索中上演。

五个主要章节的顺序和...