Ricanness

Reviewed by: Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anti-Colonial Performance by Sandra Ruiz Leticia Alvarado RICANNESS: ENDURING TIME IN ANTI-COLONIAL PERFORMANCE. By Sandra Ruiz. New York: New York University Press, 2019; pp. 256. Amid institutional moves to remote learning in the face of COVID-19, my Twitter feed kept me up at night, replete with warnings that we in the continental United States would soon experience federal negligence like that endured by Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and its diaspora in the wake of Hurricane Maria. This warning came, by coincidence, as I prepared to teach Sandra Ruiz's Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance in what would be my last in-person class of the spring semester. Underscoring the need to think the offerings of Ricanness with and through the death wrought by coloniality, Ruiz contributes to an impressive number of interdisciplinary fields (Latinx and performance studies prime among them) and shows an inspiring facility with complex theory. Ricanness also reveals how culture workers' strategies for enduring violent regimes offer "bearable ways of . . . being-together, being mutually transformed" (25), a powerful thesis to absorb during pandemic isolation. This, in short, is a book for our time—a slow, looping, seemingly interminable time, marked by death, disproportionately of Black and Brown people. In Ricanness, Ruiz argues that the aesthetic, accessed through durational performance, shows us Rican endurance within a coloniality that biopolitically positions Ricans as living in, with, and toward death in sustenance of majoritarian power. Finding possibility particularly in performative disruptions of linear time, Ruiz meditates on Rican subjectivity and survivance. Key to her theorizing of Ricanness is the idea of looping, "whereby actions to redress the past lead us into the future and back again to something prior," an ontological navigation of colonial time that understands death as inextricable to the experience of being Rican (3). Ruiz suggests that, against mandates to avoid negative narratives of hopelessness, grappling with death allows us to glimpse "something more futural and promising [that] might land us in search of ourselves, in our wanton liberations against our unwantedness" (24). Across four chapters, Ruiz braids readings of performance (ADÁL's Puerto Ricans Underwater, Lolita Lebrón's 1954 attack on Congress, Papo Colo's Superman, Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses, and Ryan Rivera's video performances) with rigorous disidentificatory applications of continental and anticolonial philosophy. A student of the late performance studies and critical race scholar José E. Muñoz, Ruiz's theoretical disidentifications—requiring neither total identification with nor total opposition to the range of theories she cites—provide the book's methodological underpinning and its liberating momentum. Her turns to Frantz Fanon and Martin Heidegger are emblematic of this disidentificatory methodology and inform her theorization of Rican ontology and temporality. Fanon leads Ruiz to the importance of "the bodily schema [as] the main site to understand the subject's interiority," bridging the anticolonial with the phenomenological while also providing a way to center race, Blackness in particular, in what she identifies as Fanon's "new humanism, a revised metaphysics" that stems from his Black existentialism (17, 15). Doing so, Ruiz challenges the traditional subject of philosophical inquiry, making a case for what Ricanness might tell us about "existence and subjectivity in the very life of the aesthetic," even while noting Fanon's homophobia (18). Similarly disavowing Heidegger's anti-Semitism, Ruiz finds value in his revulsion to linear notions of time that limit "one's access to an 'authentic' life through the prime example of the mechanistic clock" (20). Working with his concept of Dasein, Ruiz conceives of time without any "real end" (21), allowing her to theorize the simultaneity of life and death in a continuum within which Ricanness loops. Together, these interlocutors provide the conceptual rubrics for Ruiz's exploration of embodied being with connection to the before and the beyond. Antonio Viego serves as another notable interlocutor, not one with which Ruiz disidentifies, but [End Page 546] rather one on whose contributions to Latinx studies Ruiz builds. In Viego's Lacanian theorization of incomplete subjectivities, Ruiz recognizes those of culture workers who, she argues, "provide a way out of [the] trap" of multiculturalist, deracialized views

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