Zusammenfassung
One of the many facets of José Esteban Muñoz’s work that has repeatedly proved significant for my writing and thinking is the articulation of an essential yet anti-essentialist communitarian politics underpinning the primary theoretical concepts for which he’s widely known. Whether it’s Muñoz’s appraisal of minoritarian disidentifications with dominant cultural ideologies or the not-yet-here utopian promise of queer futurity, such influential critical frameworks are invariably bolstered by an astute assessment of how subjugated groups, through a range of expressive forms, articulate practices of collectivity that necessarily push against the grain of normative understandings of community and antirelational modes of being. In “The Brown Commons,” the first chapter of his posthumously published book The Sense of Brown (2020), Muñoz extends his earlier desire to put forward a “version of queer social relations” that is at once “critical of the communitarian as an absolute value and of its negation as an alternative all-encompassing value.”1 “Brown commons,” he asserts, “is the commons of brown people, places, feelings, sounds, animals, minerals, flora, and other objects.”2 And just as he stakes claims for provisional notions of solidarity and belonging in his earlier work, Muñoz makes clear that the “brown” in brown commons is not a fixed identity category but rather a capacious signifier encompassing those who “have been devalued by the world outside their commons.”3 Furthermore, the brown commons “is not about the production of the individual but instead about a movement, a flow, and an impulse to move beyond the singular subjectivity and the individualized subjectivities.”4 In short, the establishment of a brown commons materializes not as a wholly formed cooperative based on assimilation or coexistence vis-à-vis individuation; rather, it is premised on the knowledge of a sense of brownness—an affective approximation more than a rigid racialized inscription, a shared feeling of collectiveness that is both historically anchored and persistently in flux—“that is our commonality.”5