Left Turns in Brown Study
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:2nd Aug '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£19.99(9781478030126)
In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms.
“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 *
ISBN: 9781478025863
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 354g
152 pages