Where the Timid Take Their Noses for a Walk

Abstract

In Left Turns in Brown Study, Sandra Ruiz proposes “the turn” as a heuristic, a new methodology for emancipatory directives for study. Guiding readers on a theoretical journey marked by Brownness, mourning, and the poetics of citation, Ruiz enacts Brown study shaped by the musicality of diverse forms, primarily poetry, though including memoir, a lyrical-theoretical essay, typographical turn pages, and vignettes. Working from within theory and activism by minoritarian thinkers, Left Turns links several concepts as entangled operations by animating a chorus of ghosts and spirits. Through typographical composition, Left Turns invites embodied readers to turn left into a sound, phrase, idea, in anti-colonial ways of reading, writing, listening, mourning. Continually reordering the dominant circular motions of time and space, the text asks readers to move intentionally with and through blind spots and uses repetition to redirect the reader in the fundamental rhythms of doing again in doing study. Left Turns considers how Brownness—as a theory, practice of deforming form, entity, curious care, immaterial energy—fundamentally harbors loss, mourning, and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living together queerly.