by Gustavus Stadler, Haverford College

~

Although he never identified as a music scholar, musicians, musical genres, bands, and songs run across and beneath the surface of José’s writing like a vital circulatory system; indeed, his work as a whole would be unthinkable without the breakthrough acts of listening of his teenage years, instigated when he walked into an independent record store in Miami and encountered the alluring covers of records by L. A. punk bands like X, the Gun Club, and the Germs. I, too, remember that moment of invitation, when punk almost instantly turned from something one was accustomed to seeing mocked in media culture into something magnificent in its promise of an elsewhere, the exhilarating medium of, as José recently put it, “a salient desire for an encounter.” Punk rock and its culture galvanized José’s way of seeing the world, well before he became an accomplished theorist. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that virtually all of it extends directly from the messy business of being a queer Cuban-born kid on the threshold of a subculture so often oblivious to its racism and homophobia.

In particular, that early listening underwrote the theory of “disidentification” and helped to bring us together, in graduate school, in the 1990s. At that point, the main target of our shared, untidy cathexis was the arty straight-boy indie rock of bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth, and the Muppet-y floppiness of their lanky front men, Stephen Malkmus and Thurston Moore. Although the affective range of this music was less forthright and brash than the punk of his earlier fixation, José loved to think about and practice listening as a jarring process that provided breakthroughs—not just as the spark for the originary teenaged moment of quasi-initiation, but as a renewable resource providing energy for one’s intellectual and social engagements. Most of my memories of my first two years of graduate school involve sitting with José in his ever-more broken-down Mazda, its backseat strewn with books and CDs, deep in conversations, whose topics ranged from music to theory to music to seminar papers to music to gossip to music to sex, and so on. It was as though music provided a frame, an orientation, for talking about everything else. I learned so much.

In some way, I think José’s relationship to pop music scholarship was its own act of disidentification. For José, to write about music wasn’t to write “about music” because for him, as with so many things in his queer worldview, the boundaries of where music ended and began were tantalizingly blurry. For José, music facilitated privately staged scenes of self-care—the classic queer teen alone in her bedroom, listening for another world through headphones—but it also meant nightlife and sociality. In other words, it wasn’t an isolable object of study that could be extracted from its context and the social relations surrounding it. He rendered its presence the way it actually exists in the world—in the background, in interstices, and then, at a particular moment of vulnerability or necessity, stunningly forward and available.

He thought of music as slippery and evasive in the same way he thought of queerness as slippery and evasive, as a medium particularly well-suited to failure: “The queer failure . . . that is more nearly a refusal or an escape.” Pop music’s ephemerality was a vital part of its attraction. One would always need more, and one couldn’t know in advance what that “more” would look and sound like, and that was a good thing. Music resonated not primarily as a cultural object or genre but as an event, something that happened and then was gone. This explains, no doubt, his fascination with the ritual of the “Germs burn,” described in his recent Social Text essay on the band, “’Gimme Gimme This… Gimme Gimme That’: Annihilation and Innovation in the Punk Rock Commons.” This practice, by which one Germs’ fan would burn another’s arm with a cigarette in a chain initiated by the band’s central figure, Darby Crash, was a way of marking a moment of kinship, both preserving the event of the burn and affirming its ephemerality.

Events happen and then they’re gone. In that recent essay, José invoked Alain Badiou’s notion of “fidelity”: “We understand and know the event not so much through the moment itself, but instead through the fidelity we have to a transformative spike in our public or personal histories” (99). I think we can infer that this, too, is what a term like “audio fidelity” meant to him—not a set of fixed principles of sonic quality, but a kind of fidelity to the work the medium of sound offered in helping one carry through on the promise of such a “transformative spike.” Undoubtedly, the reading of the Magnetic Fields’ song “Take Ecstasy with Me” in the coda to Cruising Utopia is his most stirring enactment of these ideas. It’s there that we see, more explicitly than anywhere else in his work, the formative, almost structural way that listening shaped Jose’s sense of queerness as always perched on the promise of the future, as an invitation to a time and place where there would always be another song.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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by Frederick C. Moten, University of California, Riverside

~

At bottom, above all, in the heart of it all, for José queerness is a utopian project whose temporal dimensionality is manifest not only as projection into the future but also as projection of a certain futurity into and onto the present and the past, piercing their previous arrangement and administration. Queerness also has a spatial dimension for José, but only insofar as it is located in displacement, at sites that are both temporary and shifting, in underground, virtual neighborhoods, ephemeral, disappearing clubs and ordinary, everyday venues broken and reconstructed by extraordinary everynight presences whose traces animate his writing with the sound and feel—as well as the principle—of hope. Like Heidegger, but wholly against Heidegger’s grain, José inhabits the convergence of “ecstasy” as spatio-temporal derangement with “existence” as stepping in and out of time. He studies study’s performative appearance in and as the social life of the alternative. He knows that sometimes the alternative is lost. That sometimes it has to get lost. That sometimes the alternative is loss. To be or to get lost might be neither to hide nor to disappear. Similarly: to lose, to relinquish or to veer away from—even if within—a given economy of accumulation—José thinks this in relation to, or as a certain disruption of, property, of propriety, of possession and self-possession, of the modes of subjectivity these engender especially in fucked-up, Locke/d down, America. Inappropriateness such as José’s—which is his, and his alone, because it is not his, because he gave it to us from wherever he was and gives it to us from wherever he is—remains undefined by the interplay of regulation and accumulation that it induces.

Consider (which is to say feel, which is to say dig) Kevin Aviance (deviance and perfume, the trace of another scent and gest and groove) as José approaches (which is to dances with, which is to say grounds with) him—accursed share and shard, cracked vessel of essence-in-motion, counterfetish instantiating the critique of possession that only the dispossessed can make. Such consideration isn’t easy. In their mutual approach, José and Aviance become something else; something else becomes them and we have to try to get beautiful like that. That beauty is hard, brown, black, black brown and beige, tinged with the sadness that attends our, and that keeps us, moving through the ongoing history of brutal enjoyment to get to what survival demands that we enjoy. José says that on the way to that—in the slow, inescapably lowdown path of our escape—we critically rush the impasse of our fetishization, the sociosynaptic (log)jam that keeps us from becoming instruments for one another, which is our destiny. What José knows about Aviance is what we also know about José. If the force of the counterfetish is lost in the Roxy, lost in the all the various pragmatisms whose asses José kicked, lost in Marx though he, at least, as Althusser might say, produces the concept that José came to discover. If the “fetish, in its Marxian dimensions, is about occlusion, displacement, concealment and illusion,” then it can also be said to be about loss or to be the lost.¹ The fetish is a representation of loss or of the lost. The condition of possibility of this necessary representational function is loss. Heidegger might say that the fetish, or the counterfetishistic property of the fetish, tends toward unconcealment, aletheia, truth. He would say that unconcealment has concealment at its heart, which we recognize in the anarepresentational content that is borne, the ephemeral and performative energy that is transmuted and transmitted when Aviance and José dance their queer, spooky pas de deux at a distance. What Marx figures as subjunctive we now know to be actual. This is to say that José neither reads nor interprets the rematerialization of dance; he extends it, becomes part of the ongoing rematerialization that is (its) performance. This is a migrant curve evading straightness and its time. This is the counterfetishistic, redistributive, performative, gesturally perfumative content of José’s writing, which theorizes loss as the instantiation of another condition of possibility: the prefigurative supplement of loss that deconstructs and reconstructs identity, that reproduces a personhood at odds with, or radically lost within, the accumulative-possessional drive; the future lost in the present, fugitive of and in the present; our subterranean movement; the shard of light we share.

José, whose irreplaceability is given in that he was always writing with somebody, and Aviance shed that light. They remain as “queer ephemera, transmutation of the performance energy, that also function as a beacon for queer possibility and survival” so we can see ourselves, both descriptively and prescriptively, as the history of abnormative in(ter)vention (ibid., 74). We have to see our everyday selves like that everynight, until the party becomes The Party; and though we’re not party to this exchange, because we’re not, we feel it, because it moves through us when we feel (for) one another. The ones who don’t see the gravity of this have never been on, let alone under, the ground. Such grounding, such approach was José, flying. The velocity of his escape remains in (f)light. See, if Aviance and José hip us to the notion that ephemera mark the ongoing production of (a) performance whose origin is always before us, then every vanishing point signals the inevitably of a return, even if it’s just the way we get up tomorrow, even if our loss make us not want to get up, because tomorrow we’ll see that the one we lost has left us something that will help us find him. Deeper still, way before the end, the ephemeral counterfetish will either make the bosses beautiful—multiply perspectival, contrapuntally out, in recovery of what’s lost in the stiffness of their stride and minds—or destroy them. Now that José is lost and found, improperly dispersed in us, it’s our job to bear that, to be borne by that, to keep being reborn in that. So let’s play.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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Notes
1. José Esteban Muñoz, “Gesture, Ephemera and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance,” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 78.
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by Licia Fiol-Matta, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

~

(En Orihuela, su pueblo y el mío, se me ha
muerto como del rayo Ramón Sijé,
con quien tanto quería.)

I turned to the Miguel Hernández poem, “Elegía,” as soon as I received the terrible news of José’s departure. Its words could easily be transposed to December 4th, 2013: “In New York, his city, and mine, out of the blue, José Muñoz has died on me, he with whom I loved so much.” Con quien tanto quería. We loved together queer theory, US latinidad, queer of color artists and, in pride of place, Cuba, José’s beloved homeland and one of my research areas since my undergraduate years.

I have felt terribly sad at the thought that José is not to go back to the land where he was born and with which he held such an intricate and loving relationship. As a scholar, José unfolded and performed his Cubanity by creating an “impersonal self” which animates his writing (Disidentifications, 178).¹ Through eye-opening explorations of Cuban artists—many “private loves,” others “public heroes” (179)—he went beyond simple recovery to theorizing their conceptual interventions. In the process, he reconceptualized Cuban America’s status as an ethnic “success story” of the United States, from queerness. Cubanity sequentially appeared as a “disidentity,” a “feeling brown,” part of a “brown undercommons” and finally as an artistic manifestation of the “sense of brown.” One of José’s final essays, on Ana Mendieta, outlines the stakes of a negative vitalism that, to my mind, he also practiced: a relationship to a land that was no less present because it was evanescent, existing as both intimate and public “connotation” (177) to be read beyond the appropriations of experts and the cognoscenti, in a principled “being singular plural” that includes personal experience without the traps of simplistic biographism.²

Some of my favorite passages in José’s work concern the Cuban artist Félix González-Torres. An artist of evanescence, González-Torres was familiar to me as a Cuban figure who attended high school and university in my hometown, San Juan, Puerto Rico. José’s writings on González-Torres exhibit an exemplary distance from identification. It is obvious that González-Torres’s exilic estrangement from Cuba informed all of his work, but José takes an oblique approach to this all-important event—much like he took an oblique approach to representing his personal, familial situation while infusing his entire scholarly oeuvre with his own identity markers. Exilic loss and the devastation wrought by AIDS, and Gonzalez-Torres’s own death from AIDS in 1996, compounded the mercantilistic reception of his artworks as a gay male, ethnic artist who should respond to mainstream art’s coordinates. José demolished this coercive reading in an elegant, graceful weaving together of González-Torres’ billboards, installations, and portraits in jigsaw puzzles and plastic bags, a dazzling interpretation I experienced as a sort of critical sublime precisely because of its emotional austerity.

José did not need to go to Cuba to “complete” himself as a scholar, although, on a personal level, I can only imagine it was important to him. However, “completion” was anathema to his thought. Throughout his works, he crafted an original vision of cubanía inflected by the beautiful suppleness of his radical latinidad. José gave us a road map or toolkit to point us in the direction of the gap, wound, or hole of displacement as a necessary condition for interpretation to take place, a critical move he and I shared. He refused to assimilate into normative channels of ethnic citizenship, particularly available to exiled Cubans in the United States. Instead, he made palpable, reachable, a queer ethnic space of negativity and futurity, taking Félix González-Torres as an early guide to his thinking on “disidentity,” following his own road map to arrive at Ana Mendieta as a Cuban artist-thinker of the “sense of brown.”

José and I came of age together in the academic profession. He was working on Disidentifications while I was researching A Queer Mother for the Nation. We were both thrust into Anglo and heteronormative worlds that made our academic existences difficult as Latin@ queers. We were equally invested in the political aspects of our work and how we could bring our academic research into institutions. Thus we worked on the initial Crossing Borders conference in 1996, which focused on Latin America and Latino queer sexualities, and were Board Members of CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies around the same time. And José recruited me into Social Text in 1997. Beyond our personal itineraries, we shared a methodological approach that concentrated on figures and figurations. While he found hope in the strategies his objects of study enacted in the face of a homicidal society bent on their annihilation, I studied how one such figure did part of the state’s work in reproducing normativity. Disidentifications doesn’t shy away from celebrating these queer artists; Queer Mother sounded a cautionary note against seeing queer artists as resistive. In both our works, melancholy and loss become hermeneutical tools to grasp at, in an “almost articulate” way, “a possibility of freedom” (177, 179).

I never met González-Torres, but as an artist he inspires in me the cariño I feel for José as a scholar-creator of worlds. Returning to González-Torres’ artworks, I’m often visited by a sense of grief at his untimely passing. José writes: “González-Torres refused to limit his grief to a privatized self” (179). I, for one, will follow José’s instruction not to let my grief be limited to a privatized self and continue the work of José Muñoz’s visionary presentness, one he discerned so generously for us in González-Torres’s and Mendieta’s mournful yet hopeful art of counterpoint and fugue, one he embodied in his own “impersonal” writing of his Cuban self, of his Cubanity “lived as brownness.”³

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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Notes
1. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
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2. Jean Luc-Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
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3. José Esteban Muñoz, “Vitalism’s After-Burn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 21:2 (2011), 192.
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by Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

“[T]here is no hope without anxiety and no anxiety without hope, they keep each other hovering in the balance…”

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope¹

José Muñoz gravitated toward Ernst Bloch’s voice and logic for Cruising Utopia. Why? What in those wildly uneven 1400+ pages of The Principle of Hope or Bloch’s other writings compelled him? Several years ago, I read Bloch in part because José told me to, and, despite the weirdness of Bloch’s exilic take on America, I came to feel deeply invested in the method of hope, in the relentless pursuit of micro-details of possibility. It has nevertheless taken me these weeks after José’s death to understand, as it were, the attraction. I think I have come up with a provisional answer, and it is not the familiar one that Cruising Utopia sought to answer the “anti-social thesis” of Lee Edelman and other thinkers of “the negative” with a fierce defense of hope. While that may be true, I think it is also likely, and more Blochian, that, in the imbrication of hope and anxiety, we learn something about the risk that we are and that we take in each other. We learn, moreover, less about anxiety (the less the better!) and more about the critique of what is present.

Queer thinkers I loved keep dying. Eric Clarke died, and Alex Doty died, and José died, none of them of AIDS or of “risk factors” we have discussed much in our queer cultures, but they died nonetheless, before their time. Or they died in an improper time, as Alexander García Düttmann says in his reflections on the time of and beyond AIDS, a split or fractured sense that “foils the constitution of a coherent time and of the coherence of a life.”² It is in fact the contention of At Odds with AIDS that the threat of dying before one’s time makes visible, or renders palpable, a fundamental “being not one” (a German pun on uneins/un-eins, “Un-eins-sein”, with which the translators wrestle) of the subject, an improper or non-identical subjectivity, as well as this fractured time or timeline. And it should not surprise us that sometimes this impropriety both of life and of time, of “lifetime,” is felt precisely as anxiety and its complement, anger, even or especially when the point ought to be to recognize a more fundamental impertinence or primordial non-belonging that alone can measure up to the horizon that is AIDS. Such, I think, was José’s pursuit, too.

The word “anxiety” does not appear a single time in Cruising Utopia, a book that is also not exactly about AIDS, although it certainly situates its flourishing lifeworlds of performance and art in the prehistory of the disease. Anxiety need not attend the conviction, the same one articulated by García Düttmann in what I have just cited, that we need to step out of the “rigid conceptualization that is a straight present” (185). This is the gift of impertinence. Stepping out, however, entails, as José knows, risking the imaginative line of a queer horizon. Whether those risks have the name AIDS or other names (disease, drugs, nightlife, travel, poverty, migration, unsafe sex, police…), whether we ecstatically embrace or resistingly refuse them with all of our energy, they will have enlisted us in our self-definition all the same. Or all the different: the project of Cruising Utopia is to offer us an anatomy of queer utopia as well as disappointment in many different guises, noticing exactly how potentialities become submerged in recollection, reflection, and other sober insistences upon so-called realism.

Cruising Utopia is emblematic of José’s irreverent and improper riposte to such realism not in the anxious disavowal (or avowal, amounting to the same thing) of identity but in the critique of what is, a critique elaborated in an impertinent reading practice. When he cites Bloch in conversation with Theodor Adorno, for example, it is in the service of reading queer performance artist and poet John Giorno’s text about unsafe sex in the Prince Street toilets, understood, rightly and breathtakingly, as a utopian vision of noble transport and social transformation. José enlists Ernst and Teddy, that is, in the vigilant work of negation not to “queer” them but to steer the critical energy that José finds exciting in them toward something else that Giorno, too, discloses. He calls this reading practice an oscillation: it sets something in motion, it repeats, it vibrates, and it touches us. He feels he has to defend it all the time throughout Cruising Utopia: I know I’m taking a risk in citing these together, he says, but, really, look what happens! Feel how you’re learning. Let it shift. Let it happen again. Like a heartbeat. Like this beautiful body of work José left for us that keeps us moving, returning and edging toward something else.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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Notes
1. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Volume One. Trans. by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 333.
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2. Alexander García Düttmann, At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking About a Virus. Translated by Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 3.
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by Elizabeth Freeman, University of California Davis

~

Sometime during the days when all the Facebook photos of José with his friends flooded in, José looking at once noble and goofy, fiercely handsome and anime-cute, I had a vision of a T-shirt with a black-and-white, high-contrast picture of José’s face. It would echo the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s famous photo of Che Guevara as made over by Andy Warhol–you know the one. The T-shirt would of course disidentify with Che, capturing and redeploying a certain Latino butchness, a certain solidarity with the freaky people, faggot-style. It would come in turquoise, fuschia, tangerine, sweat yellow, and ACT UP white. José’s many friends, so many that we have not all met, would glimpse one another disappearing down subway staircases or turning corners at conferences or lurking at dingy bars. And we’d know we always had more comrades to meet.

What did José teach me about X? Look, we were girls together, kids from fancy liberal arts colleges who arrived at graduate school to do what we did not yet know to call queer theory in about 1990. I can’t say I’ve ever pivoted my own work directly around a particular term or scholarly move of José’s, though rereading him always reminds me that I owe him even more citations even than I thought I did. For example, he understood camp as a memorial practice long before I got there: “like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object, a disidentifying subject works to hold onto this object and invest it with new life” (Disidentifications, 12). I’m working on sacramentality now, on the sacramental as a way of imagining a history of sexuality that doesn’t march relentlessly toward the secular, and it turns out Cruising Utopia already knows a lot of what I’m trying to say when I wrote this sentence: “queer culture parts ways with New Historicism by treating [a] fragment as a doorway not just into ‘the past,’ but into a series of complex temporal relations: acknowledgements of contemporary paradoxes and struggles, invocations of a future to come, surrogate relations to the dead, nonlinear models of descent (and dissent).” I think I’ll read José from here on the way so many of us now read Eve Sedgwick, seeing the things I am struggling to come to already there in work dating back to the early 1990s. I can live with that temporal twist, though: he lives in a future I haven’t reached yet.

But the Che/José T-shirt vision recalls me to a moment that José cites in Disidentifications. This vision and this moment don’t fit the academic-legacy, high theory model I’ve been struggling to figure out how to inhabit for this in memoriam (I struggle in part because if he’s dead, we are no longer thinking the same cultural moment together, not in any literal way, and that’s too painful). Anyway, José cites Augie Roble’s 1993 documentary Cholo Joto, where Valentín describes seeing a mural of Che accompanied by a quote: “A true rebel is guided by deep feelings of love” (quoted in Disidentifications, 14). José reads Valentín’s response to this quote—“I’m not going to fight out of anger but because I love myself and I love myself and I love my community”—as a disidentifying rearticulation of masculinist Chicano nationalism in queer terms, a way of reanimating of the lost homoerotic valences of early nationalist thought (15). And that is not wrong. But in 1993, this quote had another future too.

“A true rebel is guided by deep feelings of love.” Yeah, that’s right, as Valentín puts it – that could go on the T-shirt, too. Because what José taught me was less a theory or an argument than a method of being in the world as a researcher, a writer, a teacher, and a denizen of multiple worlds (in his case, underworlds). Here is a thing everyone knows about José: he loved a scene he wasn’t the center of. He liked to set them spinning, step back, and make exquisite fun of them. His scenes were the opposite of the traditional dramatological kind: you never knew when they’d start (except never on time) or finish (though always after hours). They often changed locations. The personnel shifted regularly. They had no goals and they had multiple, multi-tentacled conflicts. José loved drama; pretty much everything lesbians did, for example, was already performance art to him. Yet—and it took insecure me a couple of years to figure this out—all of his social mongering and fomenting, all his screwball choreography, was a practice of love. In other words, it really was all about you, not about him. He made it for you. A friend of mine left his memorial in New York last weekend saying, “What I learned from José was to have more parties.”

That is not not theory. José built the worlds he thought about. In his work, and in any number of concrete spaces from the classroom to the lecture hall to the gallery to the club, he created glorious mash-ups of artists and academics, oddballs and wannabes, the fabulous and the pasty-faced. Though you might wonder sometimes if you were cool enough to keep up, nobody was ever the butt of anything for more than a minute, though he did quip about his life as a matchmaker, mentor, network-tangler, and slut, that everything happened in “This Bridge Called My Crack.”¹ His rebellion—sneaky boy!—was not to leave anyone out, not to limit his conversations with those as well-educated as he, not to read people’s work contemptuously or decide who was smart enough and who wasn’t (at least, not in public—what he said off the record sometimes traveled, but it was always too funny to hurt much). His party could always be bigger.

So a lot of us who knew José Muñoz, thought with him, cruised with him, laughed with him, made fun of ourselves with him, I think a lot of us have taken up his practice of rebelling against the academy’s, the art world’s, the “community’s,” the Queer Mafia’s most banal forms of cruelty, though he left and we will still leave room, please, for a good joke cracked about anyone. Professionally—to narrow the world a bit, just for a moment—this has meant: figure out what someone is saying even if it sounds like crazytalk. Introduce people to one another. Don’t be afraid of people who are smarter than you. Consider everyone’s success a piece of yours, too. Cite down, gossip up, psychoanalyze lushly and lovingly, invite everyone in. Rebel against the idea that we’re narrowing the gates because these gates—the ones you can see, like tenure-track jobs or book awards or art stardom or the velvet ropes at the coolest club—they are not the ones that count. The ones that count are in front of José’s heaven, and they are wide open. So get out that T-shirt. Put it on, it’s the only thing we have to wear.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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Notes
1. Muñoz’s essay “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and Other STDs)” (in Theatre Journal 52 [2000]: 67-79) includes a subsection entitled “This Bridge Called My Crack.”
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by Ann Cvetkovich, University of Texas at Austin

~

In the wake of José’s death, many people have invoked passages from Cruising Utopia in order to express the significance of his work and what he meant to them. His call to “hear something else” and “feel something else” in the “then and there of queer futurity” has been a form of solace, as though we might be able to feel him while “cruising utopia.” Although I too feel that call, my thoughts have turned more to the book he hadn’t yet published, which was once called Feeling Brown but which morphed over time to become The Sense of Brown. I’ve been waiting for the book at least as far back as the essay called “Feeling Brown,” about Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover, which was published in 2000. It is an article to which I returned again and again to ponder José’s ambitious aim of “describing how race and ethnicity are to be understood as “affective difference.” By affective difference I mean the ways in which different historically coherent groups “feel” differently and navigate the material world on a different emotional register” (70). I found these sentences so thrilling for what they meant about the promise of the affective turn.

But it took a while before I was able look back to those old publications. When José first died, I just wanted to think about him as a friend not a colleague. It was too heartbreaking to acknowledge how much I will miss the live encounters with his thinking and how much I have come to depend on learning about his ideas in conversations about work in progress—from queer faculty working groups years ago at NYU, to Public Feelings events, to a salon about the good life in my living room last year. When I was finally able to turn to his writing, one of the first things I reached for was the work that I taught most recently—“Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” his essay about Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan and Melanie Klein’s depressive position. I had assigned it for my spring 2013 graduate seminar on “Queer Affect, Queer Archives,” and the students wanted to return to it at the end of the semester because we hadn’t had enough time to cover it the first time around. My files thus contain two sets of notes, which makes it easier to see which points seemed most important. What follows are some of the things that stood out then and that I find myself wanting to remember and pass on now.

First and foremost is this more recent essay’s articulation of the turn away from identity and towards affect in order to describe brown as a “feeling,” including the brilliant rephrasing of Gayatri Spivak to yield the compelling question, “How does the subaltern feel?” I quote at some length in order to provide the context:

My endeavor, more descriptively, is intended to enable a project that imagines a position or narrative of being and becoming that can resist the pull of identitarian models of relationality. Affect is not meant to be a simple placeholder for identity in my work. Indeed, it is supposed to be something altogether different; it is, instead, supposed to be descriptive of the receptors we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt. This leaves us to amend Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous quotation, “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988, 1999) to ask How does the subaltern feel? How might subalterns feel each other? (677)

I love the modification of Spivak’s question because the original has been crucial to my own intellectual formation, and the revised version echoes a question that has driven my research, “How does capitalism feel?” José’s questions not only signal the affective turn but affirm the use of the vernacular word “feel” as a theoretical term. Even as he is gearing up to explain how Kleinian object-relations theory and the depressive position have something to offer, he signals the value of ordinary feelings and lived experience as a foundation for thinking, as in: “Describing the depressive position in relation to what I am calling “brown feeling” chronicles a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right [my emphasis] within the protocols of normative affect and comportment” (676). For those who often “don’t feel quite right,” this is profoundly enabling work.

Also apparent in the longer passage quoted above is the conceptual challenge of the turn from identity to affect, evident in the rhetorical gestures that underscore this move–the insistence that affect is not a mere “placeholder” and the stated desire that it “be something altogether different.” As a reader, I lean in closely for the next sentence where José mentions the “receptors” and “frequencies” that allow us (or “certain subalterns”) to hear and feel each other. I love this sense of “tuning in” to something that can’t fully be felt, and I want to hear more about the notion of “racialized attentiveness” (680), which constitutes not only a method but a way of living or a structure of feeling. A close reading of this vocabulary of attention helps explain why José might have moved from “feeling” to “sense” as a keyword or critical concept, as he developed a language for tracking the subtle mechanisms by which queers of color or “minoritarian subjects” find and connect with one another.

José’s distinctive mix of high and low archives, including his range of theoretical sources, constitutes a queer method or, as he puts it, “the stitching I am doing between critical race theories, queer critique, and psychological object-relations theory” in order to produce a “weak” and/or reparative theory. Here as elsewhere, his work is also distinguished by his commitment to a canon of white Marxist and European theory and his ability, often through disidentification, to put what might seem like unlikely sources to service in thinking about queers of color. Through “stitching” together somewhat unlikely companions, and a willingness to let the seams show, he avoids the “cryptouniversalism” (688) of those who are too faithful or narrow in their theoretical allegiances. One of the reasons I am so upset to lose him is because we need “brown feelings” if affect theory, including its queer versions, is not to become too white. His insistence that the affective turn be about race needs to be carried forward.

José also staged encounters between different bodies of theory by working closely with queer of color artists, who produce theory in a different register. In “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” he turns to Nao Bustamante, one of the fellow travelers with whom he had a long connection and through whose work and friendship his projects were conceived. In his analysis of Nao’s tears and her literal use of stitching in Neapolitan’s crocheted video installation, he offers an account of “the depressive position” as a historically specific form of racialized affect. He invites us to hear the “sound of brown feelings” in the work’s soundtrack and to appreciate the outlandishness of the “sad crow of depression” perched on top of the TV monitor that features Nao’s crying face. And he gently but firmly admonishes those who would mistake this particularity for something either stereotypically Mexican or universally human. It is poignant to read this account now in retrospect and to hope for the reparative potential of tears.

As I turned reluctantly to the necessity of now meeting with José through writing rather than in person, one of the things my archive yielded was the original book proposal for Feeling Brown. I have one version that we discussed in the NYU Queer Faculty Working Group, likely sometime in 1999-2000, and another version that I read for Duke UP in 2000 so that he could get an advance contract. I was surprised to remember how long ago the proposal had been written; José had just barely published Disidentifications, and he already had a robust second book project. I think it was useful for him to publish Cruising Utopia first; because The Sense of Brown was so ambitious, it benefited from continuing to evolve over time. In the interim, affect theory exploded and morphed in no small part as a result of José’s own work, including the Women and Performance special issue he edited, which stakes out the relations between affect theory and psychoanalysis, the essay on Ana Mendieta in which he more directly addresses sense over feeling, or the talk he had been giving over the last year on Wu Tsang’s documentary film Wildness, in which he was developing his notion of a “brown commons.”

But even in this early version of the project, the key point that race is experienced as a feeling is already present. In both versions, I circled the sentences (quoted in my initial paragraph) that also appear in the Ricardo Bracho essay. My notes show excited questions that would prove generative for me and so many others — about national affect, about the relation between Marxism and psychoanalysis, and about the use of Williams and DuBois as sources for affect theory. Queer affect theory was still emerging at that point, and although we would come to fuller set of tools, José, who had a head start as Eve Sedgwick’s student, was inventing something very rich in order to make good on his vision of “a radical reconceptualization of ethnicity as affective specificity.” I will continue to tune in to his work to “feel something else” — including “the sense of brown.”¹

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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Notes
1. The phrases “hear something else” and “feel something else” are underscored in Kay Turner’s song “Cruising Utopia,” the lyrics for which are taken from José’s book and originally performed at “Otherwise: Queer Scholarship into Song,” Dixon Place, April 4, 2013 and subsequently at memorials for him in New York.
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Works Cited
José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s The Sweetest Hangover (and other STDs).” Theatre Journal 52:1 (2000): 67-79.
—–, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position.” Signs 31:3 (2006): 675-688.

by Daphne A. Brooks, Princeton University

~

I would like to share a minor tale from yesterday as a way to continue thinking about the world of the what-might-be with which José Muñoz gifted us and which our ensemble of voices are keeping alive today.

Last March, I showed up at NYU for a panel I had organized on the “musician as urban planner”—inspired by and featuring Fred Moten. It was a session that also included Alexandra Vazquez, Gayle Wald and Greg Tate, and in the audience sat our friend José. The paper that I read that day was hardly even that at the time. I called it “Midnight Fever Dreams for Diana Ross,” or something like that. But what moved me so, what ultimately spurred me on to finish the piece, was that José had said such kind things to me about it. It wasn’t until he moved on last December that I found out that we were a year apart in age—which seemed impossible to me because I had looked up to him for so long as a colleague and friend who had generously created opportunities for me and welcomed me into his vast, roving, electric network of thinkers and artists and rebels and outsiders. Age is important in the case of this short tale I’m telling about yesterday because I can better understand today why my meditation on the Lady Di of our childhood would have perhaps hailed my beloved fellow Gen-Xer José in a particular way.

If my thoughts about her were shaped so wholly and deeply by José Muñoz, the pioneering, field-altering theorist, world-making mentor, institutional-builder and undercommons cartographer, if my thoughts about her could not have taken flight without his insistence on pointing us towards a then-and-there, they were also, unbeknownst to me at the time, holding the kernel of yet another revolutionary manifesto that José was radically improvising already, one that I would hear about the last time I saw him at the American Studies Association: that of “brown theory,” an embrace of the here and now and the beauty and power of what we already are.

So humbly and very briefly, then, I share these words and sounds for José as I read them last year.

When I grow up/will I be pretty/Will you be big and strong?/Will I wear dresses that show off my knees?/Will you wear your trousers long?/Well I don’t care if I’m pretty at all/And I don’t care if you never get tall/I like what I look like, and you’re nice small/We don’t have to change at all…

Free to be you and me, sang our own groovy Miss Ross, part of the Marlo Thomas ensemble of voices who re-ordered our universe while we sat on shag carpets and swapped Evil Knievel action figures and Ezra Jack Keats urban collages. My own Gen X earliest memory of Miss Ross consists of her re-ordering my playground with those light-as-feather vocals—to me always gender-ambiguous because they, of course, resembled that other voice coming out of my sister’s stereo speakers all day long, the voice of a then-teen Jackson 5 lead singer who, confusingly and yet perfectly and fittingly (because how else could it ever be?) sang “When I Grow Up” with “quiet fire” soul earth mother Roberta Flack on the Free to Be Television special that my friends and I watched, re-played in our heads and re-enacted on the playground for most of that first grade school year.

The hyper-femme “womanly” and yet “childlike” delicacy of her voice was its own kind of powerful statement of extremes, a queer gateway and an invitation to go with her “Somewhere” else (pace José), just as she and Mary and Cindy sang to us so triumphantly on national TV in the face of unspeakable and yet oh-so-familiar horror and trauma on April 5th, 1968.

She was always, then, in my childhood, the voice insisting that we were as “normative” as we already were. So that even though, yes, Berry Gordy, my 10-year-old People-Magazine-reading self saw the crass ways in which you re-structured The Wiz, turning Dorothy into a mid-20s school teacher and ousting virtuosic teen ingénue Stephanie Mills so that your “Endless Love” could “ease on down the road,” I was willing “to go to there” with her because she already sounded out fanciful, limitless possibility, safety in playing. She was a songbird often lambasted for her aesthetic “plasticity”, accused of failing the dreaded “A” word, but that putative “IN-authenticity,” that Courtney “fake-it-so-real I’m beyond fake” ethereal register was a reminder that if we did change at all, it could and should be a glorious “act”—one that we could work “fiercely” at Studio 54 or as oddly-as-we-wanna-be as a black New Wave nerd sporting pink hightops in Shallow Alto, California.

She was the soundtrack for our childhood civic universe, “a land” as the oh-so-crunchy New Seekers sing in the Free to Be theme—where “the children are free… where the rivers run free,” in a land of the “green country… a land bright and clear/the time’s a comin’ near… take my hand and we’ll live…”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_26FOHoaC78

Today, let’s all hold hands and move towards the place that José saw coming….

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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A previous version of these remarks was delivered at the MLA 2014 session entitled “Drama Divisions: Envisioning Tomorrow for Jose Munoz.” Portions of this material appear in Daphne A. Brooks, “Let’s Talk About Diana Ross,” ed. Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste (NY: Bloomsbury, 2014).

by Barbara Browning, New York University

~

 

when push came to shove, you were all talk,
all action. that’s because you knew to hear
how portentous a speech act was: the “wow”
and “gee” of it all, the fun of the yack over coke
– let’s blow this hamburger stand – better late
than never – you were always late, but somehow
way, like way, ahead of the curve. put jelly
on your shoulder, baby. let us do what
you fear most. it was you who let us feel
this world was not enough, that something was
missing. then you blew the hamburger stand.
hm. thanks a lot. no really. thanks a lot.
no, really. i don’t know how to thank you. i think
i may be trying to do it for the rest of my life.

~

Author’s note:

After José passed, I wrote a couple of things for memorial or tribute events or publications, reflections that mixed the personal, the professional and the political, each time noting that he really didn’t differentiate between these things, which was the point … Anyway, as I approached this task one more time, with the prompt to consider a particular keyword or concept of significance to him, I began to write about the role that poetry played in his work – especially his later work. But then I just wanted to write a poem for him, and so I did.

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Visit the full José Esteban Muñoz gallery here.

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