A book presentation and talk had with Professor Sandra Ruiz

Moving between theatre, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art, Ruiz merges the philosophical, social, and psychic at the site of non-linear aesthetic practices. In doing so, the author argues that Ricanness operates as a continual performance of bodily endurance against U.S. colonialism, unfolding via aesthetic interventions in time. In this reading, Ruiz challenges the colonization of time and our normative assumptions of negation, incompletion, exhaustion, endurance, and violence, alongside moments of pleasure, desire, and redemption. A theorization of Ricanness, as the author expresses, supplies a relational way to imagine, dream, and construct alternate forms of existence under colonialism, across bodies of water and beyond the annexation of land.

This event was hosted by The Department of Performance Studies and co-sponsored by CSGS and CLACS.