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.

In Screening Queer Memory, Anamarija Horvat examines how LGBTQ history has been represented on-screen, and interrogates the specificity of queer memory. She poses several questions: How are the pasts of LGBTQ people and communities visualised and commemorated on screen? How do these representations comment on the influence of film and television on the construction of queer memory? How do they present the passage of memory from one generation of LGBTQ people to another? Finally, which narratives of the queer past, particularly of the activist past, are being commemorated, and which obscured? Horvat exemplifies how contemporary British and American cinema and television have commented on the specificity of queer memory - how they have reflected aspects of its construction, as well as participated in its creation. In doing so, she adds to an under-examined area of queer film and television research which has privileged concepts of nostalgia, history, temporality and the archive over memory. Films and television shows explored include Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman (1996), Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine (1998), Joey Soloway's Transparent (2014-2019), Matthew Warchus' Pride (2014) and Tom Rob Smith's London Spy (2015).

Examines queer performance and affective response in the Black radical tradition to demonstrate how love animates the contemporary prison abolition movement.

Drawn from the life narratives of more than seventy African American queer women who were born, raised, and continue to reside in the American South, this book powerfully reveals the way these women experience and express racial, sexual, gender, and class identities--all linked by a place where such identities have generally placed them on the margins of society. Using methods of oral history and performance ethnography, E. Patrick Johnson's work vividly enriches the historical record of racialized sexual minorities in the South and brings to light the realities of the region's thriving black lesbian communities. At once transcendent and grounded in place and time, these narratives raise important questions about queer identity formation, community building, and power relations as they are negotiated within the context of southern history. Johnson uses individual stories to reveal the embedded political and cultural ideologies of the self but also of the listener and society as a whole. These breathtakingly rich life histories show afresh how black female sexuality is and always has been an integral part of the patchwork quilt that is southern culture.

Laughter in the Archives: Jackie "Moms" Mabley -- I Love You Bitches Back: Spect-Actors and Affective Freedom in I Coulda Been Your Cellmate! -- The Black Queer Citizenship of Wanda Sykes -- Contemporary Truth-Tellers: A New Cohort of Black Feminist Comics -- Conclusion.

DIVProminent queer theorist offers a "low theory" of culture knowledge drawn from popular texts and films./div

In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us, Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what he calls “Black gay habits of mind.” In conversational and lyrical language, Allen locates this sensibility as it emerged from radical Black lesbian activism and writing during the long 1980s. He traverses multiple temporalities and locations, drawing on research and fieldwork conducted across the globe, from Nairobi, London, and Paris to Toronto, Miami, and Trinidad and Tobago. In these locations and archives, Allen traces the genealogies of Black gay politics and cultures in the visual art, poetry, film, Black feminist theory, historiography, and activism of thinkers and artists such as Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, Essex Hemphill, Colin Robinson, Marlon Riggs, Pat Parker, and Joseph Beam. Throughout, Allen renarrates Black queer history while cultivating a Black gay method of thinking and writing. In so doing, he speaks to the urgent contemporary struggles for social justice while calling on Black studies to pursue scholarship, art, and policy derived from the lived experience and fantasies of Black people throughout the world.