Article,
The Brown Commons in the Time of Pandemic: Reflections on Zoom and Livestreamed Performance
Afterimage, 49 (1): 39-44 (March 2022)
DOI: 10.1525/aft.2022.49.1.39
Abstract
I first met José Esteban Muñoz through his writing in the collection Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996), which he co-edited with Jennifer Doyle and Jonathan Flatley while still a graduate student. At the time I was writing a dissertation chapter on Warhol’s films that read the Factory and Warhol’s production methods as examples of collective, non-singular authorship. Like Warhol, Muñoz strikes me as first and foremost an artist of the social, a person working in the social as if it were a medium. And while Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown (2020) is in some ways a book about Latinx art and culture, it is not a book about identity or an identity group—nor any other notion of discrete, disconnected personhood that the terms “author” and “artist” can evoke. The term “brown commons” is carefully chosen in Muñoz’s final book to suggest something less proprietary than identity, less proprietary even than community, people, or collectivity, the first two of which suggest implicit membership criteria and the idea that different groups might be set against one another (“my” community, “my” people), the last of which conveys the sense of individuals coming together and sharing resources according to a system of apportionment (a collectively run business). The phrase “my commons” would be an oxymoron, the exclusionary vibe of the first-person possessive rendering the idea absurd. Nor is it easy to imagine a business run on the principles of “commons decision-making” or “commons profit-sharing.” The commons is that which by definition cannot be privatized or individuated—not even in democratic or equitable ways. The commons resists division. It is a magic circle that anyone can walk or drop into and out of, where animals can graze and gather to play, a resource that is not used up, but instead increases its bounty the more times it is accessed and spread around.
