Hello,

This is a research project I did first the essay proposal and I’ll upload it for you here. So you can know what topic it is and what recourses that I’ve used and you know how to start with the

Annotated Bibliography

For this annotated bibliography, I am expecting 8 sources, two of which may be from our class readings.

Components of a Proper MLA Annotation

All of the sources that you choose should be relevant to the project, albeit they can be varying degrees of use to the project. Your sources should engage similar themes, topics, or arguments as your paper. You should also avoid using critical sources that are very old as evidence for your argument. Ideally, most of your sources should be published in the last 15 years, and you should consider the time in which the source was produced if it uses statistical or demographic data of any kind.

DO NOT shortchange yourself by writing mediocre annotations. The more in-depth your work is now, the less work you will have to do later. Be specific in your annotations and write about things that you feel will be relevant to your paper. That includes all of the following: the source’s central argument, evidence to support that argument, sources the author consulted, an assessment of how persuasive the argument is, etc. You should be able to come back to your annotations and find them useful for your project.

All of your sources should be properly cited and formatted, using MLA style. Proper citation and formatting of your sources not only produces a coherent draft that is legible to your reader, but also demonstrates your ability to recognize and approximate standard protocols of academic research.

Some guiding questions to help you:

• What is the article’s/book’s central argument?
• How does the author of the article/book support the major claim of the text?
• What is the significance of the article’s/book’s central argument?
• What are the strengths of the article/book? (Well argued, thoroughly researched, timely publishing, etc.)
• What are the weaknesses of the article/book? (Unsubstantiated claims, evidence lacking, potentially outdated source, etc.)
• Are there parts of the argument that are more convincing/persuasive? Less convincing/persuasive? Why?
• How might the article or book might be valuable for your final paper?

Sample Annotation (this should have a “hanging indent,” but BlackBoard doesn’t allow me to do that):

Godreau, Isar P. “Flowing Through My Veins: Populism and the Hierarchies of Race Mixture.” Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico . University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 177-202. Print.

This chapter from Isar Godreau’s ethnographic project on San Antón, a historically black neighborhood in Ponce, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico (and, to a lesser extent, US) discursively constructed the ‘Puerto Rican race’ as an object of civic and national pride, as a homogenized blend of Taíno, Spanish, and African. Godreau charts how post 1950s, the “ideology of race mixture” became a state-building project in Puerto Rico (178). Prior to this, blackness was treated as something that could be eliminated from Puerto Rico via interracial marriage and white culture. Both the US and Puerto Rico’s local government paid social scientists, health specialists, etc to examine the island’s residents, where they declared Puerto Rico a race- blind utopia. Puerto Rican populist politicians also actively encouraged interracial families and offspring, with the nuclear family as a unit of the nation-state. The Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña explicitly describes the nation in racial terms, with a discourse of racial mixture in which distinct racial identities a relic of the past. Unique afro-Puerto Rican cultural art forms became incorporated under the general header of “puerto rican music and art.” Nonblack Puerto Rican poets in particular have presented a hypersexualized, dehumanized image of black women in negrista poetry, pointing to blackness as a ever-present essence that flows in the blood of all Puerto Ricans. This piece provides a sharp understanding of how racial homogenization narratives ultimately serve anti-black state-building projects, in which white subjects benefit from such narratives. I am interested in thinking about how such constructions of racial homogeneity are reified by Puerto Rican immigrants to the mainland as a form of strategic essentialism.