Status Updates From The Queer Limit of Black Me...

"Grief can be a practice of celebration. Black lesbian literature and the archives created by Black people around the world are symbolic altars to commemorate and celebrate the ancestors and encourage the living. They go beyond the queer limit of the known definition of Blackness...beyond a precipice of Black memory into the darkness of queer irresolution and unpredictability."

"The fiction that I have discussed throughout this book is a memorial for the dead and an archive for the living; it is part of a constellation of Black queer practices of remembering."

"Formerly colonized Black people are put in the impossible position of having the only avenue for human identification in the form of the colonizing power. Even after the formal end of colonialism, the colonizer's reach is still felt in various ways..."

"Whom do we remember as part of Black collective memory, and how 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?"

"The alternative fictional archive created by the Black lesbian authors in this book makes interventions into familiar narratives of Black life, asking questions about how the ancestors are remembered. Or, more pointedly, which ancestors do we include in Black collective memory?" (159-160).

"Only when [Elizete and Verlia] take advantage of the grace that brings non-normative, unconventional pleasures and love into their lives to the women rest for a moment, each belonging to herself and to the other and, by extension, remapping diasporic belonging in each other's arms."

In putting Fanon and Brand in conversation: "Instead of the body being a site of separate consciousness, it is this embodied act of mutually pleasurable erotic experience that cracks open the boundaries of self-making."

"Through Verlia's dismissal, the text helps us realize that love is necessary, in a Marxist sense, to reproduce the revolutionary."

"Elizete's affirmation of uncertainty is an eloquent articulation of a politics of articulation....What unfolds is a decolonization of Elizete's consciousness through an epistemology of the erotic....Verlia's presence requires her to be willing to make herself open to a different kind of pain than she is used to" (148-149).

"One of the outcomes of the regulation of bodies is that people are often brutalized into a tacit disregard for life....This disregard creates a situation in which it seems better to physically die than to exist under conditions of social death and brutality....In this case, I read Verlia's and Adela's suicides and Elizete's thoughts of suicide as a consequence of biopolitics."

"Loving Verlia is a resistance to the patriarchal and captialist regimes of exploitation and raw extraction of labor power that situated [Elizete] as supposedly 'lucky' in her brutal exorbitance."

"Elizete's naming is an embodied practice of remembering and a practice of erotic connection to the land and to Adela. She moves through her world imaginatively recreating what has been disremembered through the lyricism of her voice."

"Elizete develops a strong tie to Adela that is based not on blood but on a kinship strengthened by the oral retelling of history....The kiss of memory that Elizete experiences in the Adela stories is the first hint in the novel of the power of the erotic to demonstrate how the dead love each other....The story of the dead is her first brush witih erotic possibility...embrace the dead as a way to resist suffering."

"...even a home of only women can be an 'unhomely' space and not necessarily a refuge....blood ties are not the only means of transmission of ancestral coping strategies for 'unhomeliness,' but they incorporate a variety of kinship relationships, even when strained or reluctant."

"...in this chapter I suggest that Black queers have come to embody 'home' in each other, in our lovers' arms, and in the way we recreate gender and the Black body. This is how we find grace through multiple displacements and disremembrances."

"[Brand's In Another Place, Not Here]gives us a glimpse at the difference queerness makes to diasporic reimagining....the novel suggests that since we cannot return to an idyllic African 'home,' and no diasporic site is without exploitation and alienation, the love and care that we show for each other is the closest we have to a return home."

"Black queer erotics are not to be taken lightly; rather, they are a necessary ingredient to creating sustained and persistent alternatives to displacement and loss."

"Spillers invites us to '[claim] the monstrosity.' From this place of reclaiming and improvisation we have a new way of imagining Black bodies, to 'pick' and to 'make it up' for ourselves. In this way, the archive becomes an embodied practice that points us to resistance strategies that have been 'forgotten' or ignored."

"...reharmonizing suggests that legibility has been deprioritized, leaving only traces of the familiar....The queer makes unfamiliar what was once familiar."

"Jazz is a re-articulation of Black gendered possibilities; however, at the same time, a melancholic attachment to Black manhood and masculinity erases all other possibilities. If...Black manhood exists in the 'vaginal cut' [Moten, Marriot, Gordon] and is already feminized, then why not 'make it up and trace it back' as Joss advises?"

"Jazz improvisation creates the possibility of self-invention toward the 'creati[ive]-imagining' of identity. These points on the diaspora are not the same...In this way, the memory of shared origins is never completely 'lost' but is in a constant state of 'becoming'....Joss is in a constant state of gendered 'becoming,' even through death."

"The trumpet is an obvious phallic symbol; however...it is detached from Joss's body, able to be taken with him or left behind....Joss's instrument of Black manhood is hybrid. Like [Lewis] Gordon's description of the male penis as an 'ambiguous organ,' Joss's trumpet has a hole (at both ends)."

"Caught in the 'nonmen-nonwomen' ambiguous gender category, Joss enters into the realm of other Black men as a reminder that Black men in general are a hybrid type....(Josephine) is the absent presence of Black female experience in the diaspora, the denied past that sustains the present and the future. Without her, there can be no Joss. He is his own mother, so to speak."

"When the nation cannot fold individuals into its plot, it must displace them in order to recover its rigidity....When Joss ('the good Black') turns 'bad,' the nation recovers itself, through the media, with claims of being duped. As a 'pervy transvestite,' Joss is unthreatening and made palpable to a public culture anxious about its own hybridity and ambiguity."

"People who identify as both male and female, or neither, or who do not change themselves through hormones or surgery, are not recognized by the state at all....The human component to state power is the secret to its weaknesses. The state's assertion (and lack) of power through categorical order is witnessed by the inability of its agents to accommodate every case of identification."

"Joss's male identity and body is essentially 'lost' to the state when the doctor designates him as 'female'....official state negation of Joss's life as male....the revelation of queer embodiment disrupts each character's desire for the normal and ordinary, exposing those constructs as illusion and fantasy."

"The mundane act of cataloguing the 'obvious' exposes how the categories of 'male' and 'female' are more nuanced and complicated than medical definitions allow....the state figures prominently in issues of sex definition because individuals have to appeal to power in order to be recognized."

"...the regulation of gender identity and documented gender markers of those under the state's purview, can give us more information about the state's mark on the body in an African diaspora context" (114-115).