Tablet of Destinies

This book not only provides a cultural history of 'blackness' in Puerto Rican television, it also locates Puerto Rico as a critical blind spot in both Latin American and U.S. television studies, one that can offer new insights into the televisual representation of race, family, and nation. --Chon Noriega, author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema Tuning Out Blackness offers an astute and very well informed analysis of Puerto Rico's unique 'racial' programming, which in turn provides a valuable look at the deep ambivalence at the heart of the country's sense of national identity in the shadow of U.S. ideological and cultural power. --Juan Flores, author of From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity Ground-breaking and complex... Provocative... A rich, engaging, vital contribution to television history and popular culture studies, Puerto Rican and Latino studies, and racial and ethnic studies. Highly recommended. --S.A. Vega Garcia, Choice In a work whose theoretical sophistication and historical breadth is matched by its cultural sensitivity, Yeidi M. Rivero explains how and why blackface comedy and imagery continued to be constructed and consumed as a valid form of popular entertainment in Puerto Rico as late as the 1990s. --Lillian Guerra, American Historical Review Yeidy Rivero's Tuning Out Blackness provides a well documented cultural history of blackness in Puerto Rican television... She makes excellent use of participant observation, interviews, archival research, and textual analysis to critically analyze representations of race in local Puerto Rican television. --Dwight E. Brooks, Journalism History Tuning Out Blackness provides a kind of 'missing link' in this area of television studies. It is a well-informed case study that paves the way for more comprehensive research. --Tomas Lopez-Pumarejo, CENTRO Journal