In honor of the publication of José Esteban Muñoz’s posthumous book, The Sense of Brown, edited by Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong′o, we asked a few writers to offer a short meditation on what the book has meant to them. Readers are encouraged to check out the book’s introduction here, courtesy of Duke University Press.
Sense of Brown Cover by Duke University Press CC BY-Fair Use
PTN welcomes four short meditations on the José Esteban Muñoz’s posthumous book.
The Political Theology Network aims to be a hub for exploring the intersection of religious and political ideas and practices. The Network is interdisciplinary, publicly engaged, and committed to building links between theologians, practitioners, and humanities scholars. Riding a wave of scholarly interest in political theology that itself follows the increasing visibility of religion in public life, the Network seeks to create the infrastructure that will allow this interest to flourish in the long term, supporting discussions of political theology in the classroom, in scholarly research, and in the public arena. By bringing scholars thinking with the term “political theology” from throughout the humanities together with scholars of religious traditions, we aim to thicken the appreciation of religion’s complexity among the former while sharpening the critical edge of the latter.
Symposium Essays
In Convivencia, a Reflection on The Sense of Brown
This piece features a multimedia reflection on José Esteban Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, which emphasizes the text’s radical approach to imagining solidarities and social relations beyond the normative paradigms of identity politics and its permutations. Through both textual poetics and sound design, Wadud and Lázaro Moreno riff off Muñoz’s own performance-based approach to storytelling and meaning-making, engaging Sense as an invitation to reconsider the aesthetic and philosophical terms of community-making, centering the power of counterintuitive methods.
The Power of Little Cockroaches Insisting on Worlds Otherwise
After a year when too many of us have mourned the tragic and untimely losses of loved ones (and raged at our governments for their roles in exacerbating these crises), I found another perspective on grief and change in Muñoz’s depiction of otherwiseness and a fable about a cockroach.
On the Work of Mourning in Muñoz
Pointing out and giving space to the melancholy at the heart of Muñoz’s work may help us rethink what queer scholars of religion, race, gender, and sexuality are doing and what we might want to be doing.
How Does It Feel To Be Seen As Needing a Cure
Reading The Sense of Brown has made the work of our collective, What Would an HIV Doula Do? less ineffable to me. While I do not think that brown and HIV are analogous, I do find thinking about the brown commons, and our HIV collective alongside each other instructive.