Left Turns in Brown Study

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.

“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.’” - Fred Moten, author of (Black and Blur) “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.” - Raquel Gutiérrez, author of (Brown Neon) "Sandra Ruiz, in her deeply resonant Left Turns in Brown Study, provides a productively scattered template for how one might begin to document this communal brown melancholia, and in the process, shows us how to walk arm in arm with the dead. In this text, which is both theoretical and poetic, Ruiz’s language holds rigor and beauty in the same palm; and her wrist flickers so that her chosen subjects are held up to us from various, sometimes distorted, angles." - Spencer Williams (Antiphony Review) "The capaciousness of both subject and audience is reflected in the book’s form: Left Turns begs to be read and shared aloud, from front to back, from middle to end, from beginning to middle. . . . Ruiz is a gorgeous and theoretically grounded writer whose work in this text serves as a model for what could be if we wrote without institutional constraints." - Karen Jaime (Centro Journal)