Ricanness

Honorable Mention, 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre ResearchArgues that Ricanness operates as a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialismIn 1954, Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón and other members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party led a revolutionary action on the chambers of Congress, firing several shots at the ceiling and calling for the independence of the island. Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance begins with Lebrón’s vanguard act, distilling the relationship between Puerto Rican subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and revolutionary performance under colonial time.Ruiz argues that Ricanness—a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism through different measures of time—uncovers what’s at stake politically for the often unwanted, anticolonial, racialized and sexualized enduring body. Moving among theatre, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art, Ricanness stages scenes in which the philosophical, social, and psychic come together at the site of aesthetics, against the colonization of time. Analyzing the work of artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future through the time travel extended in their aesthetic interventions, illustrating how they have reformulated time itself through nonlinear aesthetic practices.

Ruiz’s relentless pressure on how fields of knowledge depend upon spatial containment eviscerates the collusion between epistemology and place. Her dazzling intellectualism models the necessarily daring edges one must seek out in discussions about aesthetics and politics. This beautifully written book encourages the demands of nonlinear thinking, the challenging pleasures of scholarship, and offers a more expansive sense of what activism can be. Ricanness is erudition for the people., Ricanness accomplishes a sustained dislocation of the hierarchies of the senses. It is an ontology of life and death, mixed with lipstick, champagne, sweat, vulgarity, and survival. It is a poetics of time and temporality. This poetics is worked out phenomenologically, aesthetically, and politically through the uncompromising stance Ruiz takes toward the violent history echoing across the unbroken Rican spirit., [Ruiz] uses the example of Puerto Rico to push theory forward—challenging it, extending it, upending it., At once challenging and generous, forcefully-argued and nuanced, Ruiz’s work demonstrates how endurance, suspension, and waiting characterize Rican subjectivities, and how aesthetic performance both reveals and confronts the colonial (and postcolonial) logics that inform these subjectivities., In shifting away from more traditional disciplinary approaches that have pervaded the field from its beginnings, Ricanness [...] turned to the promise of the aesthetic in order to understand and move beyond the confines of political discourse that limits resistance to the realm of grand political acts.

Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre & English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance and the co-editor of the book series Minoritarian Aesthetics. Ruiz is also the founder of La Estación Gallery and the co-founder of the Brown Theatre Collective.