Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Ruiz is the author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance, Left Turns in Brown Study, and the coeditor of the book series Minoritarian Aesthetics. Ruiz is also the producer of La Estacion Gallery and the Minor Aesthetics Lab.
Description
"A beautifully lyric sojourn of release to better worlds, pleasures, and becomings relevant to scholars of Performance Studies, Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Latinx Studies, Sociology and Art History. The tender respect Tears for Tears extends towards each featured artist, and their creative works invite considerations of grief that only collectivist performances entangled with so much love can reveal. I marvel at Sandra Ruiz's power to write with/in the unmapped space-time of counter-cultural performance to trace unexpected energies and impermanent presences in every memory, ritual and tear."-- "Ruth Nicole Brown, author of Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood" "An invaluable contribution to black, brown, feminist and queer scholarship on loss. Brilliant and beautifully written, Tears for Tears reframes or rather unframes minoritarian grief, refusing to contain it within the narratives of colonial racial capitalism. Sandra Ruiz turns instead to performances of grief by minoritarian artists-theorists in which holes torn by loss become active portals. In the expansive forms of communion these performances invite, across the presumed divide between life and death, and the awareness of 'ensemblic entanglement' their textures and rhythms awaken, Ruiz finds ways of working through loss that are also ways of working toward a collective construction of a new social order. The project, she teaches us, is not to seek closure but to hold the portals open."-- "Laura Harris, author of Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Helio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness"