In the last decade, Latinx performance studies has shifted internally and moved beyond its origins in a resistance-based model of ethnic studies scholarship towards messier, more unruly, and anti-identitarian expressive modes (Rodríguez Reference Rodríguez2014; Alvarado Reference Alvarado2018; Hernandez Reference Hernandez2020). So much of this thinking is indebted to the work and guidance of the late José Esteban Muñoz, whose critical oeuvre over the course of his lifetime, from his monographs, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) and Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), to a myriad of articles, essays, and other musings, has driven the field to new heights. The Sense of Brown, Muñoz’s final offering, illuminates a wide-ranging, ever-evolving theory of brownness to understand how minoritarian subjects, especially those variously located under the signifier of Latinx, feel and sense the process of racialization. An unfinished volume posthumously assembled with essays from the late 1990s up to his untimely passing in 2013, The Sense of Brown marks a careful, but full-throated, renunciation of empirical, identity-based models of Latinx studies in exchange for attention to performance as “a mode, a protocol, a path toward an attunement to the brownness of life and the world” (118). The task at hand is twofold: to appreciate the longue durée of Muñoz’s theoretical and methodological importance for Latinx performance studies and scholars of minoritarian aesthetics more broadly, while squaring it with what is left even more incomplete but urgently needed to address: the incommensurability of brownness with blackness, and in particular, black Latinx subjecthood.

A heuristic text, The Sense of Brown invites its readers to travel along with Muñoz as he develops his theory of brownness. He draws from a panoply of intellectuals including Fred Moten, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Jane Bennett, but the work is most significantly marked by the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy. Brownness is defined variously as the shared experience of feeling different in a world wrought by racialized (un)belonging, “a mode of affective particularity that a subject feels in herself or recognizes in others” (40). Muñoz’s thinking on brownness shifts over the course of the essays, from “feeling brown” to “sense of brown.” It is in these later moves towards the sensorium that he arrives at the notion of “the brown commons,” wherein minoritarian subjects discern their racialization in relation to one other.

Crucially, this sense of brownness is not based on ideas of multiculturalism where visual representation equals power, but rather in a communal sensibility of what Norma Alarcón calls an “identity-in-difference” (Reference Alarcón and Arteaga1994:125). In contrast to his future-oriented notion of queerness, Muñoz’s brownness is located in the present and attentive to a state “not only of people who live in the United States under the sign of latinidad, but of a majority of those who exist, strive, and flourish within the vast trajectory of multiple and intersecting regimes of colonial violence” (122). This capaciousness underscores the wide reach of Muñoz’s thinking with brownness, a modality that attempts to divert the ontological logjams of Latinx but also has the potential to reconfigure how we consider minoritarian life in the face of oppression.

Performance, and in particular the performance work of Latinx individuals, is the bedrock of Muñoz’s sense of brownness. Artists such as Ricardo Bracho, Ana Mendieta, María Irene Fornés, and Nao Bustamante — whose solo performance America, the Beautiful graces the book cover — attune us to the brownness of the world by encouraging us to think alongside, not about, their work. As evidenced by the analysis of Luis Alfaro’s Cuerpo Politizado in chapter 7, which opens with a vignette of Muñoz inviting Alfaro to join him on the conference stage, The Sense of Brown’s method of besideness takes seriously the work of performers of color as theorists and interlocutors whose aesthetic practices “achieve a new counterpublic formation in the present through lived performance praxis” (60). This approach to thinking along with minoritarian artists is a hallmark of Muñoz’s work and one of the greatest gifts he offers to the field of performance studies.

In accepting Muñoz’s treatise on brownness as not yet complete, one cannot help but wonder how he would have responded to the global Black Lives Matter movement and Latinx studies’ reckoning with anti-blackness. It is clear that black thought informs his approach, most pointedly in the Du Boisian-inspired chapter “Chico, What Does it Feel Like to Be a Problem?,” which aspires to map out “the series of relays between the affective spike of what blackness meant and continues to mean within the historical field of U.S. culture and of what brownness might mean today” (37). At the same time, The Sense of Brown would have felt different with a greater integration of black Latinx thought, such as the field-defining The Afro Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Román and Flores Reference Román and Flores2010), as well as the aesthetic practices of black Latinx performers such as Celia Cruz and Josefina Báez.

Towards the end of The Sense of Brown, Muñoz writes of his desire for a brownness that is “a co-presence with other modes of difference, a choreography of singularities that touch and contact but do not meld” (138). What we can gain from Muñoz’s intervention as we look towards the future is the chance to imagine ways of being that do not assume similarity across minoritarian lives. This imperative is especially important for Latinx studies, which must forgo, as Muñoz does, an easy equivalence of brownness with blackness, especially at the expense of black Latinx lives. Instead, we must center performances that acknowledge our relationalities without reproducing the harm of anti-blackness and colonialism.