The Incomplete Subject of Colonial Memory: Puerto Rico and the Post/Colonial Biopolitics of Congressional Recollection

Abstract

Congressional discourse on Puerto Rican self-determination is a memorial narrative that, although on its face an attempt at decolonization, constitutes Puerto Ricans as incomplete colonial subjects, reinscribes and normalizes the U.S.-Puerto Rico relationship along the axis of a flexible colonialism, and reveals the way in which Puerto Rico, as colony, is remembered in the “post/colony” envisioned by the United States.