Ricanness
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.
Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance and Left Turns in Brown Study. Aesthetics. Ruiz is also the producer of La Estación Gallery and the Minor Aesthetics Lab.