The Possibilities and Limits of Brown/ness(es)

The Possibilities and Limits of Brown/ness(es) Naveen Minai (bio), Neelofer Qadir (bio), and Tina Chen (bio) feeling brown, feeling down. Feeling down, being brown. A name for law, a name for affect, a name for ontology, a name for relation, a name for not relation, a name for antagonism, a name for empire(s), a name for capital, a name for an accusation, a name that can be convenient, a name that does not work, a name that can stop working, a name for shades, a name for fantasy. about and not about In the moment in which we write this editors' introduction, brown is a charged and weighty term across disciplines and fields in North American academic networks. This special issue considers both when brown might be useful and may be used to do the work of relation, inquiry, theory—and when brown does not work (Macharia 2013, 2016, 2019). Rather than a singular and homogenizing colonial process of racialization, we conceptualize brown/ness(es) plurally, a formulation that seeks to index the slipperiness of this concept, which is about and not about identity, about and not about race, about and not about feeling, about and not about relation, about and not about desire, about and not about empire, about and not about oppression, about and not about pleasure, about and not about precarity, about and not about salvation, about and not about connection, about and not about in/visibility. In her entry "Brown" for the Keywords for Asian American Studies, comparative race studies scholar Nitasha Tamar Sharma (2015, 18) notes that brown "refers not to a thing or person as much as to the processes through which these are given meaning." Historicizing the usage of brown—first via the Oxford English Dictionary, which locates initial usage in eleventh-century Old English and Middle English as a color that End Page vi means "duskiness, gloom"—but elaborated upon largely with a focus on U.S. imperialism, Sharma (2015) argues that "'Brown' as a reference to people's phenotype, like 'Black,' is not merely descriptive or U.S. based—it is political and global" (19). José Esteban Muñoz (2006, 676), whose work we reference in our opening lines, explores "brown feeling" as a depressive position that "chronicles a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don't feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment." In his entry on "Brown" for Keywords for Latina/o Studies, Joshua Javier Guzmán (2017) suggests that brown is "hard to categorize" (25), in part because it is many things: a categorical crisis, a temporal phenomenon, an existential threat, a fantasy, a negation, a displacement, a methodology, a mode of reading, and "an investigative process into the vital phenomena of mixture and immiscibility" (28)—among others. Clearly, multiple genealogies of brown can be traced, a plethora of definitions of and debates about brown/ness(es) and their attendant feelings, attachments, and hauntings. Postcolonial nationalism. Third World solidarity. Decolonial theory. Critical ethnic studies. Women of color feminism. Queer of color critique. These academic genealogies are anchored in overlapping transnational infrastructures and contested histories of war, empire, and capital. Historical scholarship about the nineteenth century reveals how European colonial actors articulated discourses of "brown" in their schemas of racial science; these, in turn, were mobilized as a means of "reconciling … monogenic theories of race" in terms of both racial differences and how those were hierarchized (Chander 2022). From the twentieth century onward, brown/ness(es)' legibilities begin to accumulate within and around U.S. racial logics with co-constitutive stickiness and attendant affect. First, they crystallize through activists' transracial solidarities indexed through self-referential phrases of "Black and brown," through the fight for and development of critical ethnic studies (Bald 2013; Prashad 2000; Elia et al. 2016). Second, U.S. empire's hegemonic deployment of brown coheres through forms of warmongering and fearmongering around demographic changes managed through technologies of biopolitical control (Bald et al. 2013; Hernández 2019; Santa Ana 2002). Brown is often imagined as a category of racial difference, diasporic difference, and postcolonial condition...