by José Esteban Muñoz edited by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o
Duke University Press, 2020 Paper: 978-1-4780-1103-3 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-1256-6 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-0997-9 Library of Congress Classification PN1590.H57M866 2020
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013) was Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and author of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity and Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
Joshua Chambers-Letson is Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of American Studies, African American Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies at Yale University.
REVIEWS
“The final work of José Esteban Muñoz—scholar, mentor, and precious node in an intergenerational and transnational web of intellectual and social relations—will be received with eager enthusiasm and a box of tissues.”
-- Juana María Rodríguez, author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
“In The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz maps and grapples with an evolving theory and method of feeling and being in the world that he names brown. In this work, brownness 'is already here, . . . vast, present, and vital.’ Muñoz gives his theory ‘historically specific affective particularity,’ rejecting the abjective. Read on their own and in tandem with Muñoz's earlier works, these thirteen essays written with care and a sense of urgency outlive his too-soon passing. Lovingly edited, they are a gift.”
-- Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
"Conceptualizing Latinx studies within the terms Muñoz offers, those of affect, aesthetics, and performance, gives way for more room in which to construct a Latinx studies that seeks to counter anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity, assimilationism, settler nation-state borders and boundaries, language essentialisms, and other settler colonial logics which merely reify the power structures perpetuating global precarity, exploitation, violence, and death."
-- Marcos Gonsalez ASAP/Journal
"The Sense of Brown is a classic academic work, so it has a density that requires effort to parse through, but it’s well worth the read. In this book, Muñoz examines how brownness, particularly for queer Latinx people, becomes a 'lifeworld' that reveals itself through performance of all kinds, including plays, films, and albums. If you loved his prior work, then The Sense of Brown serves as a perfect ending—both putting a bow on his scholarship and creating pathways for those who want to further it."
-- Evette Dionne Bitch Magazine
"The book is his most pointed intervention into Latinx studies and the contradictions of Latinx racializations, and it represents the work of nearly two decades, done alongside and around two books and over a dozen essays and lectures. . . . As students, friends, and readers, we meet The Sense of Brown, finally, as a consolation in the midst of a global crisis that’s paradoxically lonely and chaotically social."
-- Roy Pérez Los Angeles Review of Books
"Offers ... startling moments of insight and ... profound intellectual generosity."
-- Jane Hu Bookforum
"Expertly edited after his passing by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, The Sense of Brown is Muñoz’s final work, and it’s a true testament to an intersectional project that suggests that 'queerness is in the horizon, forward dawning and not-yet-here. Brownness diverges from my definition of queerness. Brownness is already here.'”
-- Maximilíano Durón ARTnews
"With The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz left a love-letter to brownness that acts as a dream for its desire. Extending to the minerals of the soil, to the animals, and to the people who bare its shade, it is an ode to a brown of rapturous multiplicity. . . [T]his book and Muñoz’s thoughts remain an arsenal full for any minoritarian subject who desires to understand and even love themselves, and their sense of being, more–a radical proposition."
-- Jess Saldaña Lambda Literary Review
"The Sense of Brown is more than a sketch of brownness as an ontology of relations; it is an opportunity to sit inside Muñoz’s writing and thinking space, an almost wistful feeling of being in his thoughts as they formed, as they firmed. Reading Muñoz’s essays invokes a meditative feeling; one gets a sense that Muñoz was reflecting on his ideas, the drafty in/coherence of this ensemble reveal the essay as process. The essays are inviting, soft and melancholic."
-- Moon Charania Society and Space
"The Sense of Brown . . . provides theoretical concepts in performance studies, Latinx studies, queer theory, and other studies of race, gender, and sexuality that are invaluable to expanding our notions of performance and racial hegemony."
-- kt shorb E3W Review of Books
"Chambers-Letson and Nyong’o provide a beautiful genealogy of Muñoz’s scholarship in queer studies, Latinx studies, and performance studies. . . . [T]he book provides readers with myriad understandings of brownness, feeling/sensing brown, and the brown commons."
-- James Huynh GLQ
"Muñoz offers a different way of being found in art and world making."
-- Patricia Ybarra Performance Research
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii Editors' Introduction. The Aesthetic Resonance of Brown / Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o ix 1. The Browns Commons 1 2. Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs) 8 3. The Onus of Seeing Cuba: Nilo Cruz's Cubanía 24 4. Meandering South: Isaac Julien and The Long Road to Mazatlán 29 5. "Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?": The Transmission of Brownness 36 6. The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante and the Sad Beauty of Reparation 47 7. Queer Theater, Queer Theory: Luis Alfaro's Cuerpo Polizado 59 8. Performing the Bestiary: Carmelita Tropicana's With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/ Con Que Culo se Sienta la Cucaracha? 78 9. Performing Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Burden of Guilt 86 10. Wise Latinas 100 11. Brown Worldings: José Rodríguez-Soltero, Tania Bruguera, and María Irene Fornés 118 12. The Sense of Wildness: The Brown Commons after Paris Burned 128 13. Vitalism's Afterburn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta 141 Notes 151 Bibliography 167 Index 175
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
by José Esteban Muñoz edited by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o
Duke University Press, 2020 Paper: 978-1-4780-1103-3 eISBN: 978-1-4780-1256-6 Cloth: 978-1-4780-0997-9
The Sense of Brown is José Esteban Muñoz's treatise on brownness and being as well as his most direct address to queer Latinx studies. In this book, which he was completing at the time of his death, Muñoz examines the work of playwrights Ricardo Bracho and Nilo Cruz, artists Nao Bustamante, Isaac Julien, and Tania Bruguera, and singer José Feliciano, among others, arguing for a sense of brownness that is not fixed within the racial and national contours of Latinidad. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013) was Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and author of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity and Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.
Joshua Chambers-Letson is Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of American Studies, African American Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies at Yale University.
REVIEWS
“The final work of José Esteban Muñoz—scholar, mentor, and precious node in an intergenerational and transnational web of intellectual and social relations—will be received with eager enthusiasm and a box of tissues.”
-- Juana María Rodríguez, author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
“In The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz maps and grapples with an evolving theory and method of feeling and being in the world that he names brown. In this work, brownness 'is already here, . . . vast, present, and vital.’ Muñoz gives his theory ‘historically specific affective particularity,’ rejecting the abjective. Read on their own and in tandem with Muñoz's earlier works, these thirteen essays written with care and a sense of urgency outlive his too-soon passing. Lovingly edited, they are a gift.”
-- Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
"Conceptualizing Latinx studies within the terms Muñoz offers, those of affect, aesthetics, and performance, gives way for more room in which to construct a Latinx studies that seeks to counter anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity, assimilationism, settler nation-state borders and boundaries, language essentialisms, and other settler colonial logics which merely reify the power structures perpetuating global precarity, exploitation, violence, and death."
-- Marcos Gonsalez ASAP/Journal
"The Sense of Brown is a classic academic work, so it has a density that requires effort to parse through, but it’s well worth the read. In this book, Muñoz examines how brownness, particularly for queer Latinx people, becomes a 'lifeworld' that reveals itself through performance of all kinds, including plays, films, and albums. If you loved his prior work, then The Sense of Brown serves as a perfect ending—both putting a bow on his scholarship and creating pathways for those who want to further it."
-- Evette Dionne Bitch Magazine
"The book is his most pointed intervention into Latinx studies and the contradictions of Latinx racializations, and it represents the work of nearly two decades, done alongside and around two books and over a dozen essays and lectures. . . . As students, friends, and readers, we meet The Sense of Brown, finally, as a consolation in the midst of a global crisis that’s paradoxically lonely and chaotically social."
-- Roy Pérez Los Angeles Review of Books
"Offers ... startling moments of insight and ... profound intellectual generosity."
-- Jane Hu Bookforum
"Expertly edited after his passing by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, The Sense of Brown is Muñoz’s final work, and it’s a true testament to an intersectional project that suggests that 'queerness is in the horizon, forward dawning and not-yet-here. Brownness diverges from my definition of queerness. Brownness is already here.'”
-- Maximilíano Durón ARTnews
"With The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz left a love-letter to brownness that acts as a dream for its desire. Extending to the minerals of the soil, to the animals, and to the people who bare its shade, it is an ode to a brown of rapturous multiplicity. . . [T]his book and Muñoz’s thoughts remain an arsenal full for any minoritarian subject who desires to understand and even love themselves, and their sense of being, more–a radical proposition."
-- Jess Saldaña Lambda Literary Review
"The Sense of Brown is more than a sketch of brownness as an ontology of relations; it is an opportunity to sit inside Muñoz’s writing and thinking space, an almost wistful feeling of being in his thoughts as they formed, as they firmed. Reading Muñoz’s essays invokes a meditative feeling; one gets a sense that Muñoz was reflecting on his ideas, the drafty in/coherence of this ensemble reveal the essay as process. The essays are inviting, soft and melancholic."
-- Moon Charania Society and Space
"The Sense of Brown . . . provides theoretical concepts in performance studies, Latinx studies, queer theory, and other studies of race, gender, and sexuality that are invaluable to expanding our notions of performance and racial hegemony."
-- kt shorb E3W Review of Books
"Chambers-Letson and Nyong’o provide a beautiful genealogy of Muñoz’s scholarship in queer studies, Latinx studies, and performance studies. . . . [T]he book provides readers with myriad understandings of brownness, feeling/sensing brown, and the brown commons."
-- James Huynh GLQ
"Muñoz offers a different way of being found in art and world making."
-- Patricia Ybarra Performance Research
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii Editors' Introduction. The Aesthetic Resonance of Brown / Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o ix 1. The Browns Commons 1 2. Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho's The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs) 8 3. The Onus of Seeing Cuba: Nilo Cruz's Cubanía 24 4. Meandering South: Isaac Julien and The Long Road to Mazatlán 29 5. "Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?": The Transmission of Brownness 36 6. The Vulnerability Artist: Nao Bustamante and the Sad Beauty of Reparation 47 7. Queer Theater, Queer Theory: Luis Alfaro's Cuerpo Polizado 59 8. Performing the Bestiary: Carmelita Tropicana's With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/ Con Que Culo se Sienta la Cucaracha? 78 9. Performing Greater Cuba: Tania Bruguera and the Burden of Guilt 86 10. Wise Latinas 100 11. Brown Worldings: José Rodríguez-Soltero, Tania Bruguera, and María Irene Fornés 118 12. The Sense of Wildness: The Brown Commons after Paris Burned 128 13. Vitalism's Afterburn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta 141 Notes 151 Bibliography 167 Index 175
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
