The Potentiality of Brown

Abstract

The Potentiality of Brown Ariana Ruíz (bio) A Review of The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. 224. $99.95 cloth, $25.95 paper. In Cruising Utopia (2009), José Esteban Muñoz proposes a strategy of critical hope that is actively practiced in response to a "here and now" that is not enough, especially for minoritarian subjects.1 Muñoz draws on this concept from the work on concrete utopia by Marxist philosopher Ernest Bloch to describe a type of hope that is indeterminate, anticipatory, and revolutionary. It is what Muñoz would later describe as "not announcing the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining the way things could be."2 The practice and potentiality of critical hope (also referred to as "educated desire") underpins many of Muñoz's theoretical projects, including his final work, The Sense of Brown (2020). Published seven years after the untimely passing of the distinguished scholar of performance studies, queer theory, and Latinx studies, José Esteban Muñoz's The Sense of Brown delves into a theorization of "Brownness" and "Brown commons" that is driven by this type of utopian hope. That is, he explores a desire to know Brownness and what a Brown commons could be. While Muñoz does not explicitly engage Bloch here as fully as in Cruising Utopia, the two nevertheless continue to be linked in thought and theory. As the editors of The Sense of Brown, Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o tell us, the manuscript was produced concurrently [End Page 211] with Cruising Utopia. In fact, Muñoz had already started to develop and present on this project before the publication of his first book, Disidentifications (1999).3 With Muñoz's passing, Chambers-Letson and Nyong'o were tasked in finalizing a draft still in development that drew from about fifteen years of Muñoz's writing. Many of the chapters included in The Sense of Brown are revised and sometimes expanded versions of previously published journal articles and chapters in edited collections. And while the editors did not omit any of the chapters from Muñoz's draft and kept his initial sequence, they did add six chapters not originally included to help frame the narrative. The result is a manuscript made up of thirteen chapters organized in two parts. The first section of the book focuses on affect and Brown feelings, whereas the second section explores the concept of Brown commons. Given the strong connection among Muñoz's scholarship, those familiar with his earlier work will recognize many of the scholars he engages here, including (among others) Raymond Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Norma Alarcón, and Jean-Luc Nancy. This theoretical range—from performance studies and postcolonial theory to ethnic studies and continental philosophy—provides Muñoz the foundation from which to consider the relationship between affect and U.S. ethnoracialization of minoritarian subjects that runs throughout. Taken together with his earlier writing, what sets this project apart is the substantial attention to the field of Latinx studies by way of Brownness. The Brownness that Muñoz posits is of the present moment and, further, urges readers to not only recognize but also act on its utopian possibilities. The question then is, what is Brownness? Indeed, Brown takes many forms in Muñoz's analysis by way of Brownness, Brown feelings, sense of Brown, Brown commons, and Brown worldings. Each of the proposed variations work to describe a sense of belonging among subjects deemed at odds with normative national affect. In other words, building from the work of May Joseph, Muñoz maintains that the United States has established unofficial affective norms that are impressed in everyday performances of (White) citizenship. The failure of subjects to correctly perform these standards marks them as Brown. This is perhaps best illustrated and complicated in the fifth chapter of Muñoz's monograph titled, "'Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?' The Transmission of Brownness." The question, derived from W. E. B. Du Bois, addresses the way subjects can affectively recognize they are seen as problematic. Muñoz...