Looping Sensations

This chapter shares the archive of the late queer Rican avant-garde multimedia artist Ryan Rivera by examining his experimental videos. Less than a minute each, these abstract videos draw the spectator’s attention to the psychical states of self-injury and suffering. Through close-ups, looping, a manipulation of real time, and overexposure, Rivera pushes the spectator to endure a series of grotesque actions; he repeatedly bangs his head, places his fist down his throat, holds his breath, retches, and punches and slaps his face. The author explicates the political and aesthetic consequences of waiting in the seat of sensation with and for a bodiless Rican subject who compels us to wait in dissonance through the exploitation of the senses. As a way to engender a type of queer calling, the author urges the reader to sit with the artist as he beats his head against the never-quite-postcolonial, creating new forms of Brown and Rican intimacy. The author reformulates the Cartesian split by showcasing the narrow space of a video screen in which the artist bangs his queer postcolonial head against the fast-paced heteronormative world.

Countdown to the Future

This chapter focuses on the work of “the poet laureate of the Nuyorican Poets” Pedro Pietri, particularly his experimental and existential one-act endurance play The Masses Are Asses. In Pietri’s crude play, events occur in timed sequences that repeat and loop back on themselves, and become clear indicators of the colonial time of dread. Pietri tackles socioeconomic issues such as poverty and imperialism, the bourgeoisie’s control of mankind, and domestic and gender violence. Through these hardships, the author argues, the reader is led into the cramped space of colonial violence doubling as a bathroom. This play invites the audience to read the text temporally, through the tempo of dread—such that a piece with only two general characters, Lady and Gentleman, makes Time the third actor. Endurance, here, operates as a hardening and precipitation of being, one animated by the intimacies of vulgarity in Pietri’s social drama.

Lipstick Revolutionaries

Chapter 1 begins with Dolores “Lolita” Lebrón Sotomayor and fellow members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party staging an armed assault against the US Congress in 1954. The author analyzes Lebrón’s actions to expose how she offers death as a way to access subjectivity. She highlights the resilience of the subject who refuses the call to suicide, and instead offers us a recitation for Being. In paying attention to Lebrón’s bodily endurance as evidence of her desire to offer death for the independence of Puerto Rico, the author asserts that as a colonial subject the only thing that she owns upon entry into the world is her death. An understanding of her death drive is linked to Lebrón’s presentation of self, challenging the androgynous view of a female revolutionary. The important aesthetic details of her performance are not antithetical to other markers that claim and seek to trivialize her: beauty queen, mother of the nation, femme fatale, beautiful convoy, and hysterical, suicidal depressive. Lebrón is more than a sacrificing mother, a pathological terrorist, or an accomplice to male leaders; she stages a site through which to dismantle Rican patriarchy and restage death, both imposed and re-created by colonialism.

Running Out of Time

Chapter 2 highlights multidisciplinary artist Papo Colo and his 1977 performance piece Superman 51. In Superman 51, Colo runs down the West Side Highway in New York City with fifty-one wooden planks attached to his back; he runs for ten minutes until he falls from exhaustion. This chapter explores the conceptual artist’s mapping of temporality against an already imposed choreography of Being through acts of collapse and the movements of running and jumping with the number fifty-one. Colo’s übermasculine public acts of endurance serve a revolutionary function for the Rican subject; he stages time on the building materials of space itself, illustrating the temporally limited components of masculinity. His performances of exhaustion highlight both the limits and potential of the Rican body bound by a geopolitical state of neither here nor there, now or then. The chapter looks particularly closely at Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and its connections to Colo’s Superman/Übermensch.

Introduction

This chapter establishes the scope of Ricanness, beginning with key historical and colonial moments between the United States and Puerto Rico, and explicating the book’s aesthetic and philosophical framework. The author introduces seminal philosophers such as Fanon and Heidegger to establish the connection between existentialist philosophy and aesthetics, showing how to read for sustaining bodies at the limit of humanity. By turning to performance sites as practices of philosophy, the author gleans the material life of Ricanness in spaces where the psychic and the social touch. Through the artist ADÁL’s photographic series Puerto Ricans Underwater/Los ahogados, the author asks how temporality, and not history alone, unearths colonialism’s eternal recurrences. These anticolonial photographs, the author argues, show viewers how to communally breathe in and out within the painful confines of colonial life. ADÁL’s personal and provocative version of an enduring Ricanness helps the author bring to light the power of aesthetic transmission.

Epilogue

The epilogue addresses the unfolding aftermath of the crisis of Hurricane Maria. Returning to the poetry of Lebrón and the philosophy of Fanon, the epilogue reinforces the book’s argument that aesthetic interventions provide an escape hatch from linear time. Without this option of time travel, Ricans remain transfixed by a constant and immediate dread, precluded from processing existence itself. Although Ricans are terrorized by a steady state of emergency, the aesthetic offers the possibility of slowing down, or doing time in life differently, within varying velocities and kinetic and somatic overtures. Artists who recycle painful events and feelings frequently create openings through which to imagine a better future—one not impervious to suffering, but pushing against its stagnant saturation. The epilogue redirects the readers’ time, landing them in a futural. For Ricanness is not an insular construction; it productively extends outward, and as a theorization may be used to understand other sites under siege. The author contends that Ricanness supplies a relational way to imagine, dream, and construct alternate forms of existence under colonialism and across bodies of water.