The Sense of Brown

“The final work of José Esteban Muñoz—scholar, mentor, and precious node in an intergenerational and transnational web of intellectual and social relations—will be received with eager enthusiasm and a box of tissues.” - Juana María Rodríguez, author of Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

“In The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz maps and grapples with an evolving theory and method of feeling and being in the world that he names brown. In this work, brownness 'is already here, . . . vast, present, and vital.’ Muñoz gives his theory ‘historically specific affective particularity,’ rejecting the abjective. Read on their own and in tandem with Muñoz's earlier works, these thirteen essays written with care and a sense of urgency outlive his too-soon passing. Lovingly edited, they are a gift.” - Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

"Conceptualizing Latinx studies within the terms Muñoz offers, those of affect, aesthetics, and performance, gives way for more room in which to construct a Latinx studies that seeks to counter anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity, assimilationism, settler nation-state borders and boundaries, language essentialisms, and other settler colonial logics which merely reify the power structures perpetuating global precarity, exploitation, violence, and death." - Marcos Gonsalez, ASAP/Journal

"The Sense of Brown is a classic academic work, so it has a density that requires effort to parse through, but it’s well worth the read. In this book, Muñoz examines how brownness, particularly for queer Latinx people, becomes a 'lifeworld' that reveals itself through performance of all kinds, including plays, films, and albums. If you loved his prior work, then The Sense of Brown serves as a perfect ending—both putting a bow on his scholarship and creating pathways for those who want to further it." - Evette Dionne, Bitch Magazine

"The book is his most pointed intervention into Latinx studies and the contradictions of Latinx racializations, and it represents the work of nearly two decades, done alongside and around two books and over a dozen essays and lectures. . . . As students, friends, and readers, we meet The Sense of Brown, finally, as a consolation in the midst of a global crisis that’s paradoxically lonely and chaotically social."
  - Roy Pérez, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Offers ... startling moments of insight and ... profound intellectual generosity." - Jane Hu, Bookforum

"Expertly edited after his passing by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o, The Sense of Brown is Muñoz’s final work, and it’s a true testament to an intersectional project that suggests that 'queerness is in the horizon, forward dawning and not-yet-here. Brownness diverges from my definition of queerness. Brownness is already here.'”  - Maximilíano Durón, ARTnews

"With The Sense of Brown, José Esteban Muñoz left a love-letter to brownness that acts as a dream for its desire. Extending to the minerals of the soil, to the animals, and to the people who bare its shade, it is an ode to a brown of rapturous multiplicity. . .  [T]his book and Muñoz’s thoughts remain an arsenal full for any minoritarian subject who desires to understand and even love themselves, and their sense of being, more–a radical proposition." - Jess Saldaña, Lambda Literary Review

"The Sense of Brown is more than a sketch of brownness as an ontology of relations; it is an opportunity to sit inside Muñoz’s writing and thinking space, an almost wistful feeling of being in his thoughts as they formed, as they firmed. Reading Muñoz’s essays invokes a meditative feeling; one gets a sense that Muñoz was reflecting on his ideas, the drafty in/coherence of this ensemble reveal the essay as process. The essays are inviting, soft and melancholic." - Moon Charania, Society and Space

"The Sense of Brown . . . provides theoretical concepts in performance studies, Latinx studies, queer theory, and other studies of race, gender, and sexuality that are invaluable to expanding our notions of performance and racial hegemony." - kt shorb, E3W Review of Books

"The Sense of Brown is full 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." - Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Theatre Research International

"Chambers-Letson and Nyong’o provide a beautiful genealogy of Muñoz’s scholarship in queer studies, Latinx studies, and performance studies. . . . [T]he book provides readers with myriad understandings of brownness, feeling/sensing brown, and the brown commons." - James Huynh, GLQ

"Muñoz offers a different way of being found in art and world making." - Patricia Ybarra, Performance Research

"The Sense of Brown, Muñoz’s final offering, illuminates a wide-ranging, ever-evolving theory of brownness to understand how minoritarian subjects, especially those variously located under the signifier of Latinx, feel and sense the process of racialization. . . . marks a careful, but full-throated, renunciation of empirical, identity-based models of Latinx studies in exchange for attention to performance as 'a mode, a protocol, a path toward an attunement to the brownness of life and the world' (118)." - Christofer A. Rodelo, TDR: The Drama Review