i.’s Reviews > The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian Literature and Irresolution > Status Update

"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."