Sensorial Errancy in Decolonial Key

Abstract

This reflection on Ren Ellys Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) engages their reading of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s cinema, paying particular attention to sensorial actualities that offer apprehension of the past of colonial violence that is the present. It focuses in particular on Santiago Muñoz’s Otros Usos (2014), which specifically explores Vieques, Puerto Rico. To apprehend the past that is the present requires indexing the continuity of the plantation economy, and thus its racial order, in the military complex, in the tourist economy, and in the current rounds of colonial settlement through tax haven conditions in the realm of real estate. The essay shifts the language of anticolonial sensorial errancy to decolonial sensorial errancy to focus on the forms of “slow violence” of economic invasion/ control, the productivity of which presses us to attend to the forms of insidious, ubiquitous racial violence they represent.