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The Sense of Brown (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)
Top of the pile
93
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
98/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
José Esteban Muñoz, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong'o
Publisher:
Duke University Press Books
Date:
October 2, 2020
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. Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.
What The Reviewers Say
Three years ago, my friend handed me a thick stack of creased pages fastened with a binder clip. The top sheet was a table of contents covered in red pen marks that listed 13 chapters under the title The Sense of Brown, the manuscript left behind by José Esteban Muñoz, our teacher, when he died unexpectedly and too soon on December 3, 2013, at the age of 46. I spent a full day with the loose pages at a coffee table, carefully turning over each sheet. The book is a moving philosophical study of our 'ability to flourish under duress and pressure,' and it could not have come at a better time.
In the cheekily eponymous, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977; 2020), Barthes identifies the German composer Schumann’s work as 'intercalated,' a 'pure series of interruptions' and 'fragments one after the next' (94).
The Sense of Brown [...] contains thirteen essays written over the course of fifteen years, from 1998 until Muñoz’s death. Like his prior work, this collection ranges across fields—from performance studies and queer theory to Black and Asian American studies—as its individual essays concatenate into something like Muñoz’s theory of brownness. Or, perhaps it would be better to say, Muñoz’s sense of brownness.
This book enters the contemporary discourse of latinidad not without its complications. As of late, the area of study has never been more divided—between dark and light, brown and white, with a sharp focus on colorism and individual identity, which is a line of thinking that seems to move in opposition to what Muñoz seeks to drive forward with this book. As someone who is not the whitest brown person and not the brownest either, questions about these divisions continue to ruin my sleep. Not to invalidate contemporary discussions around the topic, I find Muñoz’s approach to be the more generative discourse regarding collective movement-building for achieving equity across race relations. Utilizing the work of theoreticians like Vijay Prashad and Wilfred Bion, Muñoz engages a global brownness that encompasses latinidad, but also reaches beyond it. I will admit, some of the language does have a dated tinge to it but keep in mind this posthumously published text has been in the works for the past decade and without his contemporary editorial eye for revision.
