Abstract
This article lingers in the suspended time of Justin Torres’s We the Animals (2011), a story of loss, alienation, and an errant desire to remain underwater. Written in the long durée of US coloniality, Torres’s novel resists the narrative conventions of the bildungsroman to contend with the ways Latinx literature is bound to narratives of forestalled self-development and failed incorporation. Such uneven relations are traced back to the ethnographic frameworks emplotted in the Insular Cases—which are a set of Supreme Court decisions that have suspended Puerto Rico into statelessness since 1901. This article argues that Torres’s refusal of narrative convention reveals how the dictates of the Insular Cases have seeped into ethnographic understandings of Latinx as suspended from normativity at large. However, Torres’s tactical use of suspension refuses to move toward legible subjecthood or linger in despair. Rather, the novel tarries with the irregular conditions of Latinx life to posit shared alienation as the groundwork for a larger, vibrant brown sociality in the ongoing muck of the Insular Cases.