The Sense of Brown (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)

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. This sense of brown is not about the individualized brown subject; rather, it demonstrates that for brown peoples, being exists within what Muñoz calls the brown commons—a lifeworld, queer ecology, and form of collectivity. In analyzing minoritarian affect, ethnicity as a structure of feeling, and brown feelings as they emerge in, through, and beside art and performance, Muñoz illustrates how the sense of brown serves as the basis for other ways of knowing and being in the world.

José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013) was Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and author of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity and Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics.

Joshua Chambers-Letson is Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.

Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of American Studies, African American Studies, and Theater and Performance Studies at Yale University.