Lingering in Latinidad: A Roundtable on a Promiscuous Special Issue of Women & Performance

For this roundtable, we have brought together the editors and contributors of the special issue of Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory entitled “Lingering in Latinidad: Theory, Aesthetics, and Performance in... [ view full abstract ]

For this roundtable, we have brought together the editors and contributors of the special issue of Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory entitled “Lingering in Latinidad: Theory, Aesthetics, and Performance in Latina/o Studies.” The intention of the roundtable is to bring the special issue into conversation with the contributors’ larger projects, in order to showcase queer and promiscuous dialogues emerging within Latina/o Studies. As such, we stay with the imperative to linger—one that is both an abiding of the temporal and spatial dynamics of latinidad, as well as a desirous longing for it.

Theorizing the brown temporality of life and death, Sandra Ruíz will present a talk entitled "Stepping into the Time of Death: Brown Existential Life.” Her talk will posit that life has the intrinsic ability to speak about an intimate death. Yet, death is an ontological evasion; it is often speechless. If death itself is the only thing proper to death, how do brown deaths differ from dominant existential notions of finitude? As an antidote to necropolitics, she is interested in how Brown death “gives us life” in the potentiality of Brownness. Put another way: What do these deaths constitute on their own terms?

Death begets mourning. As such, Iván Ramos will examine questions of mourning, race, and difference in Chantal Akerman's 2012 documentary From the Other Side. Ostensibly a film about the rising number of immigrant deaths across the Arizona desert, the film shifts from political protestation to the work of melancholic reckoning. Ramos explores first the aesthetic encounter between Chantal Akerman's depression and the quotidian sadness of the families to reveal how melancholic empathy marks the meeting place between the filmmaker and her subjects. The film allows us an opportunity to discuss the proper objects of Latina/o Studies beyond the identitarian and instead through a commitment to the difficulty of a shared affective world.

Such a sharing of the world entangles us in the proximal, as Roy Pérez shows in his work on Martin Wong. Nicknamed “Chino Malo,” gay Chinese-American painter and art collector Martin Wong’s proximity to latinidad in the 1980s largely eclipsed. By analyzing Wong’s minor paintings, Pérez contends that a poetics of proximity unfolds through which the internal order of Nuyorico is suspended, disturbed, and reframed. Wong’s poetics are a series of persistent queer advances that unsettle Nuyorico’s “good” center. Pérez theorizes this proximity as a critical alternative to theories of acculturation that hold sway in Latino studies. La maldad signaled by Wong’s nickname is an aesthetic posture—a mal movement or comportment that loosens identity practices from their toil toward completion and full knowing.

Moderated by the editors of the special issue, we seek a dialogue with the aforementioned participants on how the promiscuity built into our queer methods foreground the aesthetic as means to help disrupt any easy, civil, or disciplined understanding of latinidad.