No Tea

“Miss Hannah’s Lesson,” and SDiane Adamz Bogus’s “The Champagne
Lady.” These texts all revise history by instantiating the black lesbian
subject over and against what Richardson calls “disremembering,” or the
pro cess by which black lesbian subjects are deliberately forgotten or “unmourned”
in the recounting of black cultural history. In a similar vein to
Toni Morrison’s argument that the white literary canon is always haunted
by a black presence, Richardson’s text represents a major intervention in
African American literary and feminist studies by suggesting that there
has always already been a black queer lesbian presence in the black literary
canon. 30 Richardson’s work is apropos as he argues that “historically, black
has been inextricably tied to the queer— the lesbian in par tic u lar.” 31
In addition to these three emergent areas in black queer studies, there
is yet another nascent area of research on black transgender subjects
emerging. Although, as of this writing, there is still no manuscript- length
study on black transgender people, there exists a feature documentary film
titled Still Black (2008), by trans filmmaker, scholar, and activist Kortney
Ziegler (who has an essay in this volume); a number of articles, including
Enoch H. Page and Matt Richardson’s “On the Fear of Small Numbers”;
as well as a number of self- identified black transgender or gender- variant
scholars. 32 Despite the increased visibility of black trans scholars, their
work does not necessarily focus on transgender research. More frequently,
they are producing work on gender nonconformity and/or gender variance,
including two essays in this volume. Nonetheless, there is a clear
sign that black transgender studies is taking hold as a legitimate form of
critical analy sis in the acad emy.
Of course, there are numerous other new areas of inquiry in black queer
studies since the publication of Black Queer Studies, and even more so in
the social sciences. The point I am trying to make here, however, is that
the promise upon which Mae G. Henderson and I (and the contributors
in that volume) hedged our bets has been fulfilled.
No Tea, No Shade comprises nineteen essays from a variety of disciplines,
including African American studies, American studies, anthropology, sociology,
film studies, history, literary studies, per for mance studies, and urban
studies, though most of the scholars are decidedly interdisciplinary. Apropos
of the authors’ background, I chose not to cluster the essays under
thematic headings but rather to let each essay stand on its own— although
the proximity of some essays to each other was inspired by some overlap in
method or theme.
14 • E. Patrick Johnson