Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies, edited by Aurora Santiago Ortiz and Jorell A. Meléndez-Badillo, will be released this month (April 21, 2026) by Duke University Press. Vanessa Díaz (Loyola Marymount University) writes, “Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies marks a pivotal moment in the field, emerging amid deepening colonial crises in Puerto Rico and rising cultural pride. It centers Puerto Rico to examine U.S. empire, colonialism, and racial capitalism. This collection rightfully pushes Blackness and Queerness to the center of the field and demands that Puerto Rican Studies be central to American and ethnic studies. Both timely and transformative, this collection is essential reading for understanding the evolving scope and stakes of the Puerto Rican Studies.”
Description (Duke University Press): Interrogating The Future of Puerto Rican Studies brings together emerging and established scholars from a wide range of disciplines to examine the disciplinary and epistemic transformations that have given way to new understandings of the field of Puerto Rican studies. Documenting the intellectual contours that have shaped the field of Puerto Rican Studies in the last decade, a diverse range of contributors survey the field with new lenses that are attentive to gender, queerness, disability, and Blackness among other things. A foreword by Yarimar Bonilla situates the volume in the context of the field’s shift, specifically in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, while other sections, including “Queering Puerto Rican Studies,” “Centering Blackness,” and “Disaster Studies and Environmental Studies,” as well as “Puerto Rican Studies in Broader Fields of Knowledges,” “Prefigurative Politics and Social Movements,” and “Legal and Political Disruptions,” create a vibrant archive of conversations taking place within the field of Puerto Rican studies with the aim of interrogating its future.
Additional Praise: “Interrogating the Future of Puerto Rican Studies is a work of both substantial scholarship and moral urgency. A multi-faceted examination of Puerto Ricans’ past and present, it is a call to challenge the silencing, a call that surfaces many questions. Students, journalists and activist networks will use it in thinking through the truths—and lies—about racial capitalism and imperial domination, as well as meanings of resistance and belonging.” – Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Emeritus Professor, Princeton University
For more information and the book’s introduction, see https://dukeupress.edu/interrogating-the-future-of-puerto-rican-studies