Left Turns in Brown Study

In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms.

“What we pull from the folds turns back on itself and us. Imagine our frustration at what invites and confronts. Our memories, our dreams, and our desires seem to dance around and against us. It’s impersonal, and it’s not personal, just gone, right in our hands, as utterly social air. Movement is founded on nothing more or less than this, says Sandra Ruiz, if we take our turn, if we study hard and dark, if we ‘never refuse to share.’”, “Sandra Ruiz’s experiments with form dissolve the boundaries of genre and allow for the incandescence of rage in its theory body to be properly ignited. Left Turns in Brown Study is a manual for reinhabiting the ruthless beauty of our theory, a way into the generative pangs of radical possibility; how we harness the power of our mourning in a time of mass death, and call on the force of ritual as a way to return ourselves to one another and back again, in language and in citation.”

Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in Theatre and English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance.