The Split Aesthetic in Anticolonial Time
Sandra Ruiz

Exploring the meeting point of the psychic and social within aesthetic life, this talk addresses the colonization of time and our normative assumptions of negation and incompletion within minoritarian performance art. Interested in how Brown and queer artists translate fragmentation into futural subjectivities, this talk moves from the aesthetic to the political to show how these artists provide an escape hatch from linear time. Or, how do we account for the unconscious properties of our flesh and the conscious claims of our bodily endurance practices when the parts are always already whole, even if here and not yet there? How might the split aesthetic supply in a relational way to dream and construct alternate forms of existence under unsovereign oppression?

Sandra Ruiz is an Assistant Professor of Latina/Latino Studies and English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Program in Comparative World Literature and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She has published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, and Performance Matters. Her book Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance is forthcoming with NYU Press (2019). She is currently working on two book projects: Perilous Pedagogy: Psychoanalytic Affections & the Live Aesthetic and a book of poetry entitled The Edge of Depth. She is also the co-founder of the Brown Theatre Collective.