Three years ago, my friend handed me a thick stack of creased pages fastened with a binder clip. The top sheet was a table of contents covered in red pen marks that listed 13 chapters under the title The Sense of Brown, the manuscript left behind by José Esteban Muñoz, our teacher, when he died unexpectedly and too soon on December 3, 2013, at the age of 46. I spent a full day with the loose pages at a coffee table, carefully turning over each sheet. The book is a moving philosophical study of our 'ability to flourish under duress and pressure,' and it could not have come at a better time ... The Sense of Brown offers a political recharge, a consoling new proximity to one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary queer theory, and a rekindling of a collective readership ... As students, friends, and readers, we meet The Sense of Brown, finally, as a consolation in the midst of a global crisis that’s paradoxically lonely and chaotically social.

In the cheekily eponymous, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977; 2020), Barthes identifies the German composer Schumann’s work as 'intercalated,' a 'pure series of interruptions' and 'fragments one after the next' (94) ... José Muñoz’s posthumously published The Sense of Brown is a work best understood in this Barthesian fashion of intercalation ... A frequent term deployed throughout these writings is attunement. Muñoz wants us to pick up on the sensorial nature of brownness, that it can be felt, sensed, and perceived in the here and now ... Brownness is not a one-to-one correlation, a toggling between identifications, not even a practice of dis/identifying with or against. Brownness is not a future dawning concept but one of presentness, what is so affixed in the here and now ... Nearing brownness, whatever it is yet to be, the further elaboration it requires, is what Muñoz leaves behind for us.

The Sense of Brown [...] contains thirteen essays written over the course of fifteen years, from 1998 until Muñoz’s death. Like his prior work, this collection ranges across fields—from performance studies and queer theory to Black and Asian American studies—as its individual essays concatenate into something like Muñoz’s theory of brownness. Or, perhaps it would be better to say, Muñoz’s sense of brownness ... Almost all the essays in The Sense of Brown are still in draft form. The editors acknowledge their introduction to be a strange placeholder for the one Muñoz himself would have liked to have written ... If what animated Muñoz’s criticism was his singular ability to combine praxis and theory in examining specific artworks, then a question arises now about how to continue his work. For despite the real gifts that The Sense of Brown gives us—its startling moments of insight and its profound intellectual generosity—what it leaves the reader with is Muñoz’s afterburn.

This book enters the contemporary discourse of latinidad not without its complications. As of late, the area of study has never been more divided—between dark and light, brown and white, with a sharp focus on colorism and individual identity, which is a line of thinking that seems to move in opposition to what Muñoz seeks to drive forward with this book. As someone who is not the whitest brown person and not the brownest either, questions about these divisions continue to ruin my sleep. Not to invalidate contemporary discussions around the topic, I find Muñoz’s approach to be the more generative discourse regarding collective movement-building for achieving equity across race relations. Utilizing the work of theoreticians like Vijay Prashad and Wilfred Bion, Muñoz engages a global brownness that encompasses latinidad, but also reaches beyond it. I will admit, some of the language does have a dated tinge to it but keep in mind this posthumously published text has been in the works for the past decade and without his contemporary editorial eye for revision ... Despite the text’s time being somewhat out of joint, this book and Muñoz’s thoughts remain an arsenal full for any minoritarian subject who desires to understand and even love themselves, and their sense of being, more–a radical proposition.