Content area
Full Text
Amid institutional moves to remote learning in the face of COVID-19, my Twitter feed kept me up at night, replete with warnings that we in the continental United States would soon experience federal negligence like that endured by Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and its diaspora in the wake of Hurricane Maria. This warning came, by coincidence, as I prepared to teach Sandra Ruiz's Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance in what would be my last in-person class of the spring semester. Underscoring the need to think the offerings of Ricanness with and through the death wrought by coloniality, Ruiz contributes to an impressive number of interdisciplinary fields (Latinx and performance studies prime among them) and shows an inspiring facility with complex theory. Ricanness also reveals how culture workers' strategies for enduring violent regimes offer "bearable ways of . . . being-together, being mutually transformed" (25), a powerful thesis to absorb during pandemic isolation. This, in short, is a book for our time—a slow, looping, seemingly interminable time, marked by death, disproportionately of Black and Brown people.
In Ricanness, Ruiz argues that the aesthetic, accessed through durational performance, shows us Rican endurance within a coloniality that biopolitically positions Ricans as living in, with, and toward death in sustenance of majoritarian power. Finding possibility particularly in performative disruptions of linear time, Ruiz meditates on Rican subjectivity and survivance. Key to her theorizing of Ricanness is the idea of looping, "whereby actions to redress the past lead us into the future and back again to something prior," an ontological navigation of colonial time that understands death as inextricable to the experience of being Rican (3). Ruiz suggests that, against mandates to avoid negative narratives of hopelessness, grappling with death allows us to glimpse "something more futural and promising [that] might land us in search of ourselves, in our wanton liberations against our unwantedness" (24). Across four chapters, Ruiz braids readings...