José Esteban Muñoz was an acclaimed Cuban American queer scholar who died at the age of forty-six in 2013. Author of the groundbreaking Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) and of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), he left an unfinished manuscript for this: his third and final book. Two of his friends, Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o, esteemed queer and performance studies scholars in their own right, took it upon themselves to edit and publish the manuscript with a co-authored introduction. The Sense of Brown is thus a collective, incomplete project that brings together brilliant essays written between 1998 and 2013 on race, performance and affect, with a particular focus on the work of Latinx artists in the United States and Cuba. It is an extraordinary book, but, as the co-editors highlight, it is also fragmentary and marked by the author's early death. In their co-authored introduction, Chambers-Letson and Nyong'o offer lucid insights into how to approach it, and how to think through Muñoz's theorizations of brownness, queerness and Latinidad – one which envisioned new models for thinking South–North displacements and the situation of outsiderness, marginality and subalternity.

One of Muñoz's main claims is that ‘performance attunes’ (p. 118–19), that it brings issues into focus, that the world is already brown, and that brownness is always already inflected by queerness. The issues Muñoz was most concerned with were how to think of utopia in the United States and elsewhere in a context marked by racism and social exclusion, overcoming the limitations of identity politics, but acknowledging the experience of ‘feeling like a problem’ (p. 36). Muñoz's priority was to envision a sense of commonality brought about by shared experiences of marginalization, through ‘structures of feeling’, to cite Raymond Williams's well-known formulation. This is what Muñoz calls ‘brownness’, building on the Chicanx or Mexican American and South Asian use of ‘brown’ as a racial descriptor evident in 1960s concepts such as ‘brown power’ and the Brown Berets militant advocacy group, but extending it to other people of colour, immigrant people, and particularly queer individuals, in a framework where brownness addresses sadness and melancholia, but also transformative, radical or revolutionary potential for change. Here, ‘brown’ becomes a new way to think race, ethnicity and Latinidad, inflected by African American, black Atlantic and other experiences. As Muñoz states,

The chapters are brief and explore a range of artists and activists, engaging the philosophical and political dimensions of brownness (chapter 1), and the work of Ricardo Bracho (chapter 2); Nilo Cruz (chapter 3); Isaac Julien (chapter 4); José Feliciano (chapter 5); Nao Bustamante (chapter 6); Luis Alfaro (chapter 7); Carmelita Tropicana (chapter 8); Tania Bruguera (chapter 9); Sonia Sotomayor, Mario Montez and Bustamante (chapter 10); José Rodríguez-Soltero, Bruguera and María Irene Fornés (chapter 11); Wu Tsang and Sylvia Rivera (chapter 12); and Ana Mendieta (chapter 13). It is clear that Muñoz sought to generate an inclusive framework integrating Chicanx artists and figures (Bracho, Bustamante, Alfaro) as well as Puerto Rican (Feliciano, Sotomayor, Montez, Rodríguez-Soltero, Rivera) and Cuban ones (Cruz, Tropicana, Bruguera, Fornés, Mendieta), along with non-Latinx artists of colour (Julien, Tsang). He also combines an interest in theatre (for example, Bracho and Fornés), performance art, visual installations (Julien) and documentary and experimental film (Montez, Rodríguez-Soltero, Tsang).

As a scholar of Puerto Rican studies, I am particularly drawn to Muñoz's insightful and unusual analysis of a wide range of Puerto Rican figures, spanning the musician José Feliciano's vexed 1968 interpretation of the US national anthem, which was considered offensive because of its melancholy tone, to Muñoz's discussion of the radical performance work of José Rodríguez Soltero, who burned the US flag in 1966. Chapter 10 (‘Wise Latinas’) is particularly innovative, as Muñoz reads the 2009 confirmation hearings of US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor through the radical performances of drag performer Mario Montez, comparing them to Nao Bustamante's media appearances and artwork. Meanwhile, chapter 13 (‘The Sense of Wildness’) uses the activism of the transgender activist Sylvia Rivera as a lens to analyse Tsang's documentary. The Sense of Brown is full of this type of enlightening readings and will appeal to readers interested in critical theory and philosophical debates as much as to people who want to learn more about contemporary US Latinx experience.