Ricanness

Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance and Left Turns in Brown Study. Aesthetics. Ruiz is also the producer of La Estación Gallery and the Minor Aesthetics Lab.

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. - Alexandra T. Vazquez, author of Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music 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. - Tavia Nyong'o, author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life [Ruiz] uses the example of Puerto Rico to push theory forward—challenging it, extending it, upending it. (Choice) 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. (Social Text) 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. (Latino Studies) Sandra Ruiz pushes us to consider how Puerto Ricans are not only forced to constantly endure subjection and violence, but also how they cultivate an existence that punctures, even if only momentarily, the stranglehold of colonialism on their lives and deaths. In Ricanness, death becomes an insurgent force under the restrictive time and limited horizon imposed by colonial rule. (Centro Journal) Ruiz's book is groundbreaking as she skillfully weaves together philosophy (specifically phenomenology and existentialism), performance studies, psychoanalysis, gender and queer studies, and Puerto Rican studies, to address major blind spots in each of these fields. (Women & Performance) Ruiz's expertly wound theoretical frame unfurls itself in her sumptuous close readings. Moving roughly chronologically while capturing alternate time looping under coloniality, she analyzes performance across media, including photography, political protest, durational performance art, plays, poetry, and experimental video. (Theatre Journal) A profoundly necessary and timely book ... Though her book focuses on Ricans in the diaspora, her theorization of alternative ways of being through anticolonial performance is not bound by colonially imposed borders between here (US) and there (Puerto Rico) ... Ricanness offers so much not only to the fields of performance studies and Puerto Rican studies, but also to Ricans like me, Ricans wanting "a relational way to imagine, dream, and construct alternate forms of living under colonialism, across bodies of water. (The Drama Review) Ruiz complicates the conventional gendered connotations of masculinized impotence and/or endurance by reading these states through the framework of colonial/national personhood. Throughout the book, Ruiz underscores how many performances of Ricanness entail a reckoning with gendered violence and a confrontation with the unfulfilled and violent promises of redemptive masculinities ... In inviting us to appreciate the aesthetic as a politic, and to understand Rican survival as an artful and embodied working upon an unending loop in colonial time, Ruiz invigorates Latinx studies engagements with performance and provides us with theories we can use to situate further performances of Ricanness. (American Quarterly)