Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance

Honorable Mention, 2020 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research

Argues that Ricanness operates as a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism

In 1954, Dolores "Lolita" Lebrón and other members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party led a revolutionary action on the chambers of Congress, firing several shots at the ceiling and calling for the independence of the island. Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance begins with Lebrón's vanguard act, distilling the relationship between Puerto Rican subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and revolutionary performance under colonial time.

Ruiz argues that Ricanness--a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism through different measures of time--uncovers what's at stake politically for the often unwanted, anticolonial, racialized and sexualized enduring body. Moving among theatre, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art, Ricanness stages scenes in which the philosophical, social, and psychic come together at the site of aesthetics, against the colonization of time. Analyzing the work of artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future through the time travel extended in their aesthetic interventions, illustrating how they have reformulated time itself through nonlinear aesthetic practices.

Author: Sandra Ruiz
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 07/09/2019
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781479825684


Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2020

About the Author
Ruiz, Sandra: - Sandra Ruiz is Assistant Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; the Program in Comparative World Literature;and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She is a co-founder of the Brown Theatre Collective.