The queer limit of Black memory
Subtitle: Black lesbian literature and irresolution
By: Matt Richardson
Series: Black performance and cultural criticism; Black performance and cultural criticism
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Columbus
Language: eng
Number of pages: 204
ISBN-13: 9780814212226
Subjects: Lesbians in literature; Blacks in literature; Criticism and interpretation; Lesbianism in literature
Description: "The Queer Limit of Black Memory : Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution identifies a new archive of Black women's literature that has heretofore been on the margins of literary scholarship and African diaspora cultural criticism. It argues that Black lesbian texts celebrate both the strategies of resistance used by queer Black subjects and the spaces for grieving the loss of queer Black subjects that dominant histories of the African diasporas often forget. Matt Richardson has gathered an understudied archive of texts by LaShonda Barnett, S. Diane Adamz-Bogus, Dionne Brand, Sharon Bridgforth, Laurinda D. Brown, Jewelle Gomez, Jackie Kay, and Cherry Muhanji in order to relocate the queerness of Black diasporic vernacular traditions, including drag or gender performance, blues, jazz, and West African spiritual and religious practices. Richardson argues that the vernacular includes queer epistemologies, or methods for accessing and exploring the realities of Black queer experience that other alternative archives and spaces of commemoration do not explore. The Queer Limit of Black Memory brings together several theorists whose work is vital within Black studies -- Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Orlando Patterson -- in service of queer readings of Black subjectivity." -- Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index (pages 199-204).
Table of contents: title: Introduction : listening to the archives : Black lesbian literature and queer memory; title: Desirous mistresses and unruly slaves : neo-slave narratives, property, power, and desire; title: Small movements : queer blues epistemologies in Cherry Muhanji's Her; title: "Mens womens some that is both some that is neither" : spiritual epistemology and queering the Black rural South in the work of Sharon Bridgforth; title: "Make it up and trace it back" : remembering Black trans subjectivity in Jackie Kay's Trumpet; title: What grace was : erotic epistemologies and diasporic belonging in Dionne Brand's In another place, not here; title: Epilogue : grieving the queer : anti-Black violence and black collective memory.