Poetic Schemas

Abstract This article reads the affective charge of ethnonationalism and antiblackness in Puerto Rican poetics and performance. Moving from the “legible” affect in Afro–Puerto Rican feminist poet Julia de Burgos's ethnonational poetry to the “illegible” affect experienced on stage by Afro–Puerto Rican queer theater and performance artist Javier Cárdona Otero, this article provides a fragmented trajectory of the antiblack and white supremacist affective violence constitutive of art-making in Puerto Rico. In doing so, it locates an aesthetic collusion between ethnonationalism and antiblackness that in turn illuminates how the aesthetics of Puerto Ricanness can be antiblack, a claim that calls into question Puerto Rican nationalism's desire or need for ethnic difference.