Decolonizing Knowledge of Black Queer Gender

Once in a great while, a gem of a book comes along. It is not only elegantly written and astutely composed, compellingly and courageously argued, but it also opens up new and generative ways of looking at the African diaspora and the disciplines devoted to its study. I am talking about Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's Ezili's Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders. I read the book with intense joy, on many levels: its theoretical polyamory, its dazzling methodology, its engrossing narrations, and the different senses it calls on. I felt admiration at the assemblage of figures, real and fictive, and the deft ways in which the author threaded the many disparate aspects of her material—“songs, stories, spirit possessions, dream interpretations, prayer flags, paintings, speculative fiction, films, dance, poetry, novels” (5)—all engaging with Ezili, together. In her quest for a radically different way of...