The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution

by Matt Richardson

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.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, Theory, History, Race, LGBT, Lesbian

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 28, 2013

About the author

Matt Richardson is assistant professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies and affiliate faculty with the Center for Women's and Gender Studies and the Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Reviews

[i. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matt Richardson’s The Queer Limit of Black Memory calls attention to the limits of Black archive and Black memory-making; in other words, Richardson’s project is to interrogate the question: “Whom do we remember as part of Black collective memory, and does disremembering the queer make that person a constitutive outsider to Blackness, and thus someone who can be excised from the world without collective grieving?” (161). To interrogate this question, to remedy the process of disremembering, Richardson examines Black lesbian literature about Black queer subjects, reading for the ways that Black lesbian literature reframes, reimagines, and re-remembers histories of the African diaspora. Ultimately, Richardson works to construct an archive, though by no means the archive of Black queer memory. In doing so, his emphasis on sensation, emotionality, and missingness offers an alternative, un-impossible memory, of a history unrecorded, but not out of reach.

[Mills College Library]

809.93352 R5242 2013