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.
- Cover
- Contents
- The Return (where we were & will be again): An Entry
- The Preturn
- If we were dead
- Juango & Roland
- The Past of an Image
- Splitting Air
- Where the Timid Take Their Noses for a Walk
- Miscarried
- For the People from the Stars
- Inner-City Juice Boxes
- Blemish (titled twice)
- Academia Descended: Emancipatory Love Words
- Aha! in Fragments
- Reading Debts
- To Be Soft
- Necropolitical Feminism
- Let’s Touch
- Incompletion as Verse
- Kimchi & Tacos
- I Guess I Forgive You
- Titled Twice (blemish)
- Las Eloisas
- With Juan Gabriel y Camila
- Loneliness Property
- Fog Play
- Suddenly a Sense
- Brown Boys
- Found in Undertone
- Friendless
- OOOOOOOOOOOOOO
- AA: Academia Ascended
- La Luz Not Mine
- Watching Dreams con Lord Lydia
- Tainted Live with a Desk
- Score for the Sand
- I Remember Us Talking about Lacan through J
- Anybody’s Anybody
- The Earless Shark or Still a Janitor’s Kid
- December’s Third: The Endnote
- Flawed I’m Possible Too or Flawed Impossible To
- The Future of the Future
- Ephemerality’s Breeze
- Epilogues & Circles
- Altar Girls en Fajardo
- End with Birds (once we all flew)
- Unbodying Grunt
- Basquiat’s Ride
- Momentum’s Secret
- With We
- Ten Scenes in Gargoyles
- Premonitions: Unturned
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliography
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