Explore My Research
Research Agenda
My research examines why racial and cultural hierarchies become durable in some contexts yet open to contestation in others. Methodologically, I combine comparative-historical analysis with multi-sited archival research, visual methods, and prosopography in my published and in-progress work. I pursue this agenda across three primary lines of inquiry: racialized tourism narratives, colonial visual culture, and the American music canon.
Dissertation
Negotiating Blackness: How Jamaica and Puerto Rico Represent Race for Tourism
Existing theories attribute the durability of racial and cultural hierarchies to a single source of power: bureaucratic authority (Weber, Skocpol), economic dominance (Poulantzas, Block), or cultural hegemony (Gramsci). While these theories explain variation within their own domains, they do not treat the interaction among state actors, economic elites, and intellectuals as a variable in itself, nor do they account for variations in counterhegemonic contestation over time. I argue instead that durability is an outcome of two interacting variables: elite alignment (the degree of coordination across bureaucratic, economic, and cultural domains) and counterhegemonic contestation (the degree of traction or "sentimental connection" alternative projects achieve within civil society). The interaction between alignment and contestation yields four distinct theoretical outcomes: durable narrative control, adaptive incorporation, incoherent strategies, and transformative possibility. As the study moves across two chapters per country, Jamaica and Puerto Rico transition through three and two model outcomes, respectively. Together, the cases move through all four theoretical outcomes, demonstrating that durability is not the result of changes in a single domain or of stable contestation alone, but of the dynamic interaction between varying degrees of elite alignment and the traction contestation achieves within civil society.A version of Chapter Two is conditionally accepted for publication in Social Forces, and Chapters One and Three have been presented at the American Sociological Association (ASA) annual meetings.
Other Lines of Research
Colonial Visual Culture
In my article, Hegemony, Myth, and Puerto Rican Postcards (1900s–1920s), currently under review, develops a hegemonic-semiotic framework to explain why competing cultural producers converge on shared visual symbols. Examining early twentieth-century Puerto Rican postcards, I show how American commercial firms, criollo elites, and independent photographers all deployed the palm tree toward divergent ends—staging benevolent colonial rule, local elite competence, and private contemplation, respectively. The study demonstrates that colonial hierarchies endure not through consensus alone, but through polysemic visual signs that opposing actors mobilize for distinct ideological purposes.
The American Musical Canon
With Rebecca Jean Emigh, I co-author How Do Geniuses Achieve Lasting Fame? The Dialectical Relationship Between Social Status and Artistic Insight, currently under review. This article examines how cultural hierarchies are made and unmade through the formation of the American musical canon, as durability takes the form of lasting fame. Comparing early twentieth-century composers across variations of race and gender, we analyze how social location shapes both artistic authenticity and institutional access. We show that achieving durable fame required both a social position that allowed composers to authentically blend lay idioms and the institutional access needed to secure performance recognition.
Research Articles
Published Work
Work in Progress
• Hernández-Pérez, Johanna. Conditionally accepted. “Contesting National Identity: Elite Alignment and Reputation Management in 1950s Puerto Rico.” Social Forces.
• Emigh, Rebecca Jean, and Johanna Hernández-Pérez. 2022. “The Present of the Past: A Sociotechnological Framework for Understanding the Availability of Research Materials.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 44 (4): 16‒27.
• Hernández-Pérez, Johanna. 2019. “Espacio Urbano y Música Popular: La (De)Construcción de la Ciudad de San Juan en la Salsa.” [IN]Genios 5 (2): 1–10.
• Hernández-Pérez, Johanna. Under review. “Hegemony, Myth, and Puerto Rican Postcards (1900s–1920s).”
• Emigh, Rebecca Jean, and Johanna Hernández-Pérez. Under review. “How Do Geniuses Achieve Lasting Fame? The Dialectical Relationship Between Social Status and Artistic Insight.”
Other Publications
• Emigh, Rebecca Jean, Johanna Hernández-Pérez, and Corey O’Malley. 2020. “Teaching Theory: Should We Cancel the Core?” Perspectives, ASA Theory Newsletter, 42 (2): 7–13.