Jon D. Rossini – författare

Finalist: 2025 ATHE Outstanding Book Award | July 21, 2025Finalist: 2025 ATDS John W. Frick Book Award | July 16, 2025Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama explores the work of a unique group of playwrights—Puerto Rican dramatists writing in the United States—who offer a model of political engagement. As members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, they have a heightened awareness of the systematic discrimination and the colonial citizenship created by Puerto Rico’s territorial status. Pragmatic Liberation analyzes the work of established playwrights as well as work that has previously received little attention in the world of theater studies, including René Marqués’s Palm Sunday. The book demonstrates the strategies these playwrights use to model a nuanced way of moving toward liberation while being sensitive to the potential impact these actions might have on those closest to us. This is a crucially important model that needs more attention in our currently polarized political moment.

Finalist: 2025 ATHE Outstanding Book Award | July 21, 2025Finalist: 2025 ATDS John W. Frick Book Award | July 16, 2025Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama explores the work of a unique group of playwrights—Puerto Rican dramatists writing in the United States—who offer a model of political engagement. As members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, they have a heightened awareness of the systematic discrimination and the colonial citizenship created by Puerto Rico’s territorial status. Pragmatic Liberation analyzes the work of established playwrights as well as work that has previously received little attention in the world of theater studies, including René Marqués’s Palm Sunday. The book demonstrates the strategies these playwrights use to model a nuanced way of moving toward liberation while being sensitive to the potential impact these actions might have on those closest to us. This is a crucially important model that needs more attention in our currently polarized political moment.

The Coloniality of Catastrophe in Caribbean Theater and Performance calls attention to theater’s capacity to reveal the constructed roots of catastrophe and offer counter catastrophic strategies to live and imagine otherwise. Engaging anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone theater from across the Caribbean and its diaspora, the 12 essays and one interview foster a pan-Caribbean view of theater, identifying shared tropes and theatrical strategies. Essays address a range of 20th and 21st century works that center the relentless cycle of “natural” disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods as well as the catastrophic effects of continuing coloniality more broadly. In doing so, they unsettle the normalization of catastrophe. Exploring the power of theater’s situatedness, its iterative quality, and its special arrangement of time, these works remind us of the impact of embodied co-presence in the political realities of everyday life.