In 1954, Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón and other members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party led a revolutionary action on the chambers of Congress, firing shots at the ceiling and calling for the independence of the island. Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance (NYU Press, 2019) highlights Lebrón’s vanguard act to underscore the relationship between Puerto Rican subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and revolutionary performance under colonial time.

Sandra Ruiz argues that Ricanness is a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism unfurling through different measures of time. She uncovers what’s at stake politically for the often unwanted, anticolonial, racialized and sexualized enduring body by turning to the aesthetic. Moving among theatre, experimental video, revolutionary protest, photography, poetry, and durational performance art, Ricanness stages scenes in which the philosophical, social, and psychic merge 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 reset time itself through nonlinear aesthetic practices. 

The book is available from NYU Press. Receive a 20% discount by using the Promo Code: RICANNESS20.

NYU Author Page: https://nyupress.org/author/sandra-ruiz/

Ruiz was recently interviewed about her book by Samantha Boyle. Read full interview.