Left Turns in Brown Study

In <i>Left Turns in Brown Study</i> 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.