Brownness In Plain Sight / Brownness as Practice

In The Sense of Brown (2020), José Esteban Muñoz theorizes the ways in which brownness is all around us. More than just an identification term, brown is also “... a manera de ser, a way of being in the world”. This panel seeks proposals that illuminate and expand the utility of both brownness as an identity and brown modes of practice.

For Muñoz, brownness has been obscured and yet “...to become attuned to the brownness of the world is to see what is here but is concealed.” Enacting “brownness” has the potential to disrupt rigid categorizations of identity including race, gender, sexuality, and nationality to create new modes of understanding. At Whittier College, “Narrative, Community, and the Transformative Possibilities of Brown Storytelling” is a three-year campus initiative dedicated to amplifying stories that celebrate the complexity, friction, and expansiveness of a “brown” identity in the US. In this panel, we seek to expand this conversation to investigate the historical roots, evolution, and utility of the term in relationship to artistic practices across diasporas and in the United States.

This panel asks: How can “brownness” help transgress categorizations of identity? In what ways does situating “brownness” illuminate obscured histories? What utility does the term “brown” offer artists, storytellers, and cultural producers in the United States? We invite papers and presentations from art historians, artists, and curators that engage with brownness in relation to identity politics, decolonial futurisms, diaspora, and aesthetics.