The queer limit of black memory: black lesbian literature and irresolution

Abstract

Matt Richardson frames The Queer Limit of Black Memory with a visit to San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Amid MoAD’s efforts to make black bodies of the diaspora visible, Richardson sees no representations of black queer bodies; rather, the museum aligns with mainstream narratives reinscribing normative gender, family, and respectability politics—a well-worn response to centuries’ circulations of narratives pathologizing black familial and kinship structures. This “queer limit” to mainstream historiographical, rhetorical, and material representations of black people renders black queer people invisible. In response, Richardson advocates an alternative MoAD, celebrating the queer “Messiness of the African Diaspora” (5). Drawing from an expansive range of understudied literary genres, Richardson’s compelling book analyzes how black lesbian fiction—as a queer archive— provides potential, sparking “an irresolute revision” of normative black vernacular traditions and archives (16). He reenvisions the past through queer epistemological methods rooted in embodied knowledge and (at times) patterned after performance. His text unfurls a performative process/politics of irresolution, illustrating how erotics and desire operate within and among often-conflicting tensions of pain and pleasure, tradition and rebellion, home and unhomeliness. Richardson puts into fruitful and clear conversation scholars who might not be read (yet) across disciplines, citing African and African diaspora studies, literary theory, queer and trans* studies, performance studies, history, and psychoanalytic theory. Finding evidence of the body, particularly of black (queer) women’s desire and pleasure in the phallogoocularcentric (i.e., a male-centered and visual text-based) archive is an arduous task. Chapter 1 considers four neo-slave narratives from the past thirty years. For Richardson, these nonrealist, historiographic texts featuring “woman-to-woman sexual relations” posit “a version of the enslaved female body ((( BOOK REVIEW