Ricanness: Enduring Time In Anticolonial Performance

This book argues that Ricanness is a continual performance of bodily endurance against US colonialism, unfolding via aesthetic interventions in time. Uncovering what’s at stake politically for the often unwanted, colonized, racialized, and sexualized enduring body, Ricanness moves among theater, 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 and temporality. Analyzing the work of artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future through the time travel extended in these artists’ and activists’ work, illustrating how they reformulate time itself through nonlinear aesthetic practices. Either stopping or waiting with time, or running from exhaustion, or dragging the spectator through dread and despair, all of these artists and activists live at the horizon of existence. Consequently, Ricanness reshifts the colonization of time and normative assumptions of death through spaces of negation, incompletion, violence, and endurance, alongside moments of pleasure and redemption. Theorizing an existential entry into the Rican future, Ricanness traverses aesthetic strategies and nonlinear time.