The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz (review)

Consisting of essays composed over the span of a decade and a half, The Sense of Brown posthumously gathers José Esteban Muñoz's writings on latinidad. Each essay included in the collection reads a queer Latinx performance by artists such as Tania Bruguera, Nao Bustamante, and Alina Troyano, among others, to sustain Muñoz's theorization of brownness as a structure of feeling. With its earliest pieces dating from the late 1990s, and bookended by Muñoz's death in 2013, The Sense of Brown sustains a dialogue with his earlier books: Disidentifications (1999) and Cruising Utopia (2009). Framed in this moment, The Sense of Brown thinks against the grain of the then official panethnic term for Latin American diasporas, "hispanic," to arrive at an understanding of minoritarian belongingness rooted in queer forms of feeling and remembrance. Braiding it with latinidad, one of the organizing concepts of what would eventually become Latinx studies, Muñoz defines brownness as an "anti-identitarian concept that nonetheless permits us to talk about Latinas/os as having a group identity that is coherent without being exclusionary" (63). Through a hermeneutics of performativity and affect, The Sense of Brown conceptualizes Latinx minority conditions as lessons in solidarity, refusal, and resistance.

Developing the sense of brown across different registers, Muñoz lets the concept manifest as a point of intersecting qualities, perspectives, and feelings. While a sociohistorical facet of brownness seeks, at its most basic and pragmatic, to articulate a collectivity, Muñoz eschews any semblance to the structures of national citizenship and instead relies on the loose yet tangible binds of peoplehood: "first and foremost, I mean 'brown' as in brown people in a very immediate way, […] people who are rendered brown by their personal and familial participations in South-to-North migration patterns" (3). By stressing cohesion through linguistic and migratory practices—as he does when thinking about a Greater Cuba expanding beyond the island—Muñoz proposes a mode of sociality through transgression (of borders, of citizenship). Brown people come together through "everyday styles of living that connote a sense of illegitimacy" (3).

Such transgression affirms the genealogies that inform latinidad. Brownness pays homage to the Brown Power and Black Power movements and shares their political aspirations. Via Du Bois's famous question, "How does it feel to be a problem?," Muñoz posits, "feeling like a problem [as] a mode of minoritarian recognition" (37) that is attentive to experiences that produce a sense of "apartness together." Exemplifying such a mode, and in this same genealogy, Muñoz turns to the anthology This Bridge Called My Back (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, as evincing how "craziness was a powerful way of being in the world, a mode of being that those in power needed to call crazy because it challenged the very tenets of their existence" (23). Feeling like a problem and being read as crazy instantiate the affective orientation of brown feelings as a cohering group identification.

The lessons taught by these genealogies reveal another facet of brownness, its immanence: "Turning to the past in this particular fashion makes the point that the world is not becoming brown; rather, it has been brown" (3). Unlike the utopianism with which Muñoz defined queerness in Cruising Utopia as not yet here, the sense of brown exists as a sociality here and now: "The task at hand is not to enact a commons, but to touch an actually existing commons" (6). Muñoz's project thus departs from the multiplicity of queer Latinx experience, yet projects outward to learn from other minoritized collectivities, conceiving a far more encompassing mode of belonging-in-difference.