Inventing Archival Justice: Shola von Reinhold's LOTE and/as Queer Archival Praxis

Archival (in)justice

I use the terms ‘archival justice’ and ‘archival injustice’ to cover a multidisciplinary range of critical and creative approaches to the ‘structural violence’¹⁹ endemic in the production and transmission of knowledge via the archival practices of what bell hooks, adopting the terminology of Riane Eisler, calls ‘dominator culture’.²⁰ Building on Eisler’s critique of a model of society based on domination and submission, hooks suggests that such a culture is underpinned by ‘interlocking systems of domination’ (37), including (but not limited to) ‘imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, [and] patriarchy’ (34). The archival practices of dominator culture are therefore those that, either directly or indirectly, work to perpetuate an ethics of domination within the sphere of memory work, to the benefit of those systems of domination. In other words, these are practices whose effect is the suppression, erasure, or exclusion of the evidential traces that have been permitted to remain as testament to the lives of those whom such systems of domination have cast as the ‘them’ to its ‘us’. Crucially, these also include practices of archival access, participation, production, interpretation, and transmission that fundamentally disempower those whom José Esteban Muñoz terms ‘minoritarian culture workers’.²¹ To speak of archival (in)justice, then, is to speak at the intersection of a movable assemblage of critical and creative thinking from across various disciplines in order to make the workings of dominator culture visible in the context of memory work.

To provide a detailed theoretical framework for this (dis)assembly point is far beyond the scope of this article and would be somewhat inimical to its spirit, besides. Dominator culture, although an enforcer of binary thinking,²² is, after all, fundamentally relational and—crucially—flexible: the balance of power between those it casts in the roles of dominator and dominated is subject to the evolution of the systems of domination upon which it relies for its survival. In the case of patriarchy, for instance, cis women’s entirely justified fears of male violence are, at the time of writing, being systemically weaponised against the transfeminine community to produce a climate in which, paradoxically, cis women who are deemed insufficiently feminine are subjected to transphobic abuse,²³ thus reinforcing patriarchy and its interlocking systems. More generally, as hooks points out, resistance to systems of domination within a domination model is made difficult due to an overreliance on a politics of assigning and avoiding blame, rather than enabling an intersectional politics of accountability.²⁴ In other words, dominator culture is eminently able to co-opt resistance to its underlying systems in a way that allows for its perpetuation.

It therefore stands to reason that the critical and creative tools necessary to expose the workings of a culture whose enabling systems are constantly adapting to attempts to dismantle them need to be, for want of a better word, modular. In this particular context, and for the purposes of a discussion of LOTE as a creative riposte to the archival practices of dominator culture, however, I will be working with a combination of approaches that permit an intersectional approach to a queer critique of those practices. In the first instance, I combine Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice with a series of queer and/or anti-colonial interventions in performance studies from Muñoz, Diana Taylor, and Ann Cvetkovich. I also draw on queer theory and the affective experiences of scholars researching sexual histories from across various disciplines, as collected in Stone and Cantrell’s edited volume Out of the Closet, Into the Archives (2015). I go on to evoke some recent literary creative archival interventions beyond LOTE itself, such as M. NourbeSe Philip and Setaey Adamu Boateng’s Zong! (2008), Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019), and Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (2020). It is by means of this assemblage that I will make a case for LOTE as a novel that both imagines and enacts intersectionally queer archival practices that attempt not only to expose archival injustice but also to resist it.

Queering archival access

In LOTE, a queer, Black, working-class, trans-coded woman going by the name Mathilda Adamarola finds herself on the trail of a (fictional) lost queer Black modernist poet called Hermia Druitt. A self-described Arcadian and aesthete, she has ‘Escaped’ the circumstances of her birth with the aid of her friend Malachi, whom she now never sees, and lives a life of highly ornamented precarity. Frequently changing names and guises, she devotes herself to intense periods of independent research in pursuit of her ‘Transfixions’—figures from a decadent queer past with whom she feels a kind of fantastical kinship. A photograph of Hermia discovered in a portrait gallery archive at which she is volunteering leads her to the Dun Residency, where the adherents of a ghastly (fictional) Thought Artist named Garreaux participate in the White Book Project, a self-negating act in which individual residents submit a work of art to an archive in which it will never be read. Aided and abetted by conflicted Garreauxvian Griselda, Mathilda encounters transfeminine, gender-nonconforming aesthete Erskine-Lily, who shares Mathilda’s devotion to Hermia and her secret society of Luxury-worshiping, proto-communist aesthetes, the Lote-Os. Through their combined research, they discover that Hermia had once lived in the building of the Dun Residency, but that her room and works had been entombed in the archive as its first submission, effectively erasing her from history. Breaking into the Residency Archive, Mathilda and Erskine-Lily discover Hermia’s room, along with instructions for a ritual on how to summon a Luxury—one of a host of Black, androgynous, angel-like beings that function as ‘sensory [messengers], communicating with the aesthetic aspects of the soul’.²⁵ Having confronted Garreaux to little effect, Mathilda, Erskine-Lily, and Griselda successfully perform the ritual to summon a Luxury. Mathilda discovers that the white book submission she had previously stolen from the Residency Archive to pass off as her own work during a practice submission was in fact Hermia’s lost poem, ‘The Fainting Youth’, and she works with fellow portrait gallery volunteer (and guerrilla archival activist) Agnes and her former boss Elizabeth/Joan to have it published. Erskine-Lily disappears from Mathilda’s life after they are deadnamed by Griselda’s closeted cousin Hector but is implied to reappear at the end of the book when Mathilda, now calling herself Hermia and living in Erskine-Lily’s former squat, encounters a familiar figure with a new name and a recognisably idiosyncratic turn of phrase.

LOTE is a novel in which each of its protagonists is navigating their own relationship with the structural violence underpinning a range of archival practices rooted in dominator culture—be that in terms of their own marginalisation or their complicity in the marginalisation of others. Key to my own understanding of these archival practices as a form of violence is Miranda Fricker’s foregrounding of the ‘harm’²⁶ caused by what she calls epistemic injustice. Fricker identifies two distinct but interrelated forms of this knowledge-based form of injustice—testimonial and hermeneutical:

Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word; hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences. (1)

In the case of LOTE’s main protagonist, Mathilda, both these forms of epistemic injustice are bound up with the question of archival access. Mathilda is, in a very real sense, ‘hermeneutically marginalized’, in that she ‘participate[s] unequally in the practices through which social meanings are generated’ (6)—in this case, the archival practices that produce the knowledge and interpretive frameworks that make memory work possible. This is foregrounded in the very first words of the novel, in which ‘[a]n incensed blond twink’ acts as the literal gatekeeper of a London archive at which Mathilda is volunteering, ostensibly by pretending to be the receptionist of ‘a members-only club’.²⁷ When Mathilda tells him her full name, the unrepentant gatekeeper tells her he ‘wasn’t given surnames’ and looks at Mathilda as though she had ‘performed a conjuration’ (14) that transforms his racialised assumptions. When Mathilda calls out his pretence, he ignores her. To complete this early snapshot of hermeneutic marginalisation, it transpires that Mathilda is one of ‘only two Black people working for the archives’, both of whom are ‘working for free’ (18).

The setup for LOTE, then, is one in which ‘[t]he failure [. . .] of mainstream, actually existing white male homosexuality to enact liberation’²⁸ is unambiguously complicit in the creation of hermeneutic injustice. Foregrounded with a mercilessly satirical touch, the gatekeeping white twink—later named as James—enforces a series of archival practices whereby Mathilda and her co-worker Agnes are rendered unequal participants in the generation of social meaning through their voluntary work. This is not limited to James’s receptionist cosplay at the desk of what turns out really to have been a ‘Horrid Old Gents’ Club’²⁹ prior to its becoming the new site for the archive. His failure to recognise Mathilda without the racial signifier of her surname is indicative of the ways in which Black bodies are read and misread in archival spaces, both as archive users and as archival subjects. In the words of the invented text Black Modernisms, excerpts from which are interspersed throughout LOTE:

Many Black Britons have escaped notice because historians have relied on clear references to race in documents as various as legal records, diary entries and business accounts, but we now know that race often goes unmentioned in all these sources. (165)

It is by a similar process that James fails to interrogate the possibilities of the absence of Mathilda’s surname in the information given to him. Thus, Mathilda is simultaneously read and misread: in a bodied sense, she is read (prejudicially) as a ‘Maniacal Black Person’ (13), and thus subject to an attempt to exclude her from the physical space of the archive; in a documentary sense, she is misread as white on paper, and thus, the possibility of her existence as a Black archive worker is imaginatively erased from the written record of her permissibility within that space.

A combination of hermeneutic and testimonial injustice is at play here, as seen in the archival practices that Mathilda and Agnes engage in within the archive itself. Where hermeneutic injustice focuses on ‘a gap [. . .] in our shared tools of social interpretation’, testimonial injustice focuses on ‘prejudice in the economy of credibility’,³⁰ of which not being believed on account of one’s race is an example. This is further hammered home when James questions Mathilda’s dating of the photograph of Hermia Druitt, assuming that the photograph—by virtue of its Black subjects—is ‘obviously no more than 30 years old’, chiding them for what he assumes is their ill-informed guesswork: ‘you’re not to put down dates unless you’re absolutely certain’ (46). As ‘minoritarian culture workers’, Mathilda and Agnes thus experience a form of testimonial injustice: their expertise is not taken seriously; their passion is made suspect according to the dictates of what José Esteban Muñoz refers to as ‘the regime of rigour’.³¹

Nevertheless, it is Mathilda’s willingness to ‘practice forms of the archival turn that put relentless curiosity and unapologetic passion to use as methods for intellectual invention’³² that enable her to disrupt the archive as a system of domination and to participate in ‘a process of recovery and justice for a queer past and present’.³³ Mathilda’s archival praxis, while informed by an obsessive expertise, is attentive to and even guided by her own affective responses to material objects. She even goes so far as to name the subjects of her research ‘Transfixions’: a means for her to ‘embody a queer fantasy not immediately accessible’³⁴; a means of inhabiting trans fictions. Both inside the archive and out of it, Mathilda’s affective encounters posit feelings of haunting, reciprocity, and kinship as forms of archival evidence. Mathilda’s encounter with Hermia’s photograph is, as with all her Transfixions, heralded by a ‘high fine rush—probably not dissimilar to holy rapture’ (30–31), under which hums ‘an almost violent familiarity. The feeling of not only recognising, but of having been recognised’ (31). This idea of bodily sensation as archival praxis extends the archive beyond its physical confines and out into the world, where the body is able to acknowledge evidence of Transfixions that have been ‘buried’ by history: ‘I would still pass a building, and a particular curve in the stone would send me reeling with sensation and it could only be because the anonymous mason was a Transfixion, their life otherwise entirely unrecorded.’ (208) Mathilda even goes so far as to construct narratives of kinship for herself to make sense of her experiences, imagining herself as belonging to ‘some divine clan of being, a sort of celestial siblinghood’ (34). What Agnes does through the liberation of ‘recovered cultural artefacts’ (83) from decades of archival neglect, Mathilda does through fantasy: where Agnes gathers ‘[e]vidence for our sublimity, documentation of our monarchic blood’ (83) by stealing unlooked-at works by or about Black people, Mathilda gathers affective evidence of the same and constructs her own narratives of divinity. This is what marks Mathilda’s archival praxis as intersectionally queer, beyond its pertaining to the recovery of queer history. Where Agnes’s extravagant thefts focus exclusively on material objects that fall within an institutional understanding of ‘evidence’ despite their being subject to institutional neglect, Mathilda’s affective methodologies demand an expansion of our understanding of what evidence is.

Here, Mathilda’s archival practice intersects with Muñoz’s writings on what it means to admit ephemera as evidence in the context of queer histories. Approaching queer archives from a performance studies perspective, Muñoz suggests that global histories of queerness have, by necessity, existed in ways that are at odds with the ‘institutional ideology’ of the academy and its ‘officiating structures’. Specifically, he argues that a combination of ‘the restraints historically shackled upon the minoritarian culture workers’³⁵ and the very real dangers of ‘leaving too much of a trace’ (6) have produced queer archives of ‘anecdotal and ephemeral evidence’ (9) that are often ‘makeshift and randomly organized’ (7). Consequently, where they exist as ‘alternate modes of textuality and narrativity like memory and performance’, queer archives present a challenge to ‘the maintenance of critical and academic protocols’ (11) that rely on a manufactured ‘claim to “rigor”’ to ‘question the evidentiary authority of queer inquiry’ (7). In other words, many of the objects comprising queer archives are, ontologically speaking, ‘profoundly queer’ in their ‘inability to “count” as proper “proof”’(6), according to the institutional logics of the academy. Mathilda is, in many respects, a connoisseur of the queerly evidential trace.

A further way in which Mathilda queers modes of archival resistance practised by Agnes is through the ways in which she approaches theft. Both women steal from different archives: Agnes from a series of institutions over the course of decades; Mathilda from the London archive, the Residency Archive, and the archive in which the lotus bark is housed. Agnes, however, limits her use of objects that have been housed under the rubric of private property to bottles from the Gentlemen’s Club bar; the artefacts remain artefacts. When Mathilda steals, however, the artefacts become objects. Fearing that her photograph of Hermia will ‘dissolve [. . .] outside of the archive’, she finds instead that it becomes ‘more substantial, if anything materialising not dissolving—sucking in atoms, becoming more of an object, more vivid’.³⁶ In this regard, and in the words of Ann Cvetkovich, Mathilda ‘affirm[s] the importance of the archive as a site of practice [. . .] where we do things with objects’.³⁷ We see this, too, when she and Erskine-Lily enter Hermia’s archived room and feel the need ‘[t]o touch everything’,³⁸ spraying themselves with her perfume and lying down on her bed to weep. However, just as Mathilda’s affective experiences in the world extend the parameters of the archive beyond its walls—and beyond the bounds of private property—so too does her doing of things with objects extend into the wider world. Her theft of the lotus bark is followed by its consumption as part of a ritual to summon a Luxury; her theft of Hermia’s papers enables the ritual’s enactment. In this way, Mathilda enacts a form of archival justice, transforming an artefact or a relic into an object, giving it purpose rather than allowing it to go uncatalogued for another generation—‘everyone would probably be dead before the museum got around to re-cataloguing it’ (417).

Embodied archives

It is not only through the queering of archival practices that the regimes of rigour underpinning dominator culture in the context of archival justice can be interrupted. Indeed, LOTE also arguably advocates for participation in the creation of embodied archives as a form of alternative, intersectionally queer-of-colour knowledge production. Here, I return again to Muñoz, who, having outlined his critique of the regime of rigour, goes on to make a case for performance studies as the means by which ‘ephemera’ can be put to work as ‘a mode of proofing and producing arguments often worked by minoritarian culture and criticism makers’.³⁹ Indeed, by focusing on ‘what acts and objects do in a social matrix rather than what they might possibly mean’ (12), performance studies is, for Muñoz, a way of redefining what an archive is. To understand how this might work in practical terms, it is useful to turn to the work of Diana Taylor, herself a colleague of Muñoz. In The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Taylor makes a case for ‘all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge’⁴⁰ as another kind of archive that she calls the ‘repertoire’ (2). Muñoz’s (necessarily brief) analysis focuses on the ‘shared structure of feeling’⁴¹ within queer communities that makes ‘innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments and performances that are meant to be interacted with by those within its epistemological sphere’ (6) a queer alternative to the traditional archive. It is this which is arguably at work in Mathilda’s affective encounters. Taylor’s approach to defining the acts that make up the repertoire, meanwhile, emphasises their embodied nature as the key to both their knowability and their transmissibility. Acts like ‘performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing’⁴²—which, for Muñoz, leave only ‘glimmers, residues, and specks of things’ as ‘evidence of what has transpired but certainly not the thing itself’⁴³—are recast by Taylor as acts that provide ongoing access to a knowledge that can be known through participation and transmitted through repetition. It is in this way that Taylor makes her case for an explicitly anti-colonial approach to the archive that is subtly different from that of Muñoz. Where Muñoz critiques the ideological construction of academic rigour as that which has the power to dismiss the ephemeral, Taylor critiques the material and/or written archive as a system of knowledge production, preservation, and transmission that grants ‘social memory and identity’ only to ‘the literate and powerful’⁴⁴ through the assumption that the embodied archive does not remain. In other words, Taylor rejects outright the supposed ephemerality of Muñoz’s ephemera.

Although the ritual to summon a Luxury (which involves physically ingesting archival lotus bark) may seem like the obvious candidate for an embodied form of knowledge production and transmission in LOTE, perhaps the most fruitful example of this form of repertoire in the novel is ornament as archive. Indeed, Erskine-Lily waxes lyrical on the subject of the relationship between Blackness, queerness, and ornament: ‘We are, you know, fundamentally ornamental creatures. Especially the likes of us. And the Lotus Eaters were the arch-decorators of myth.’⁴⁵ For Erskine-Lily, it is the ornamentation of the body that perpetuates the spirit of the Lote-Os, participating in rituals of adornment that are a form of embodied knowledge:

They humiliated our ancestors for adorning themselves in flowers and beads and gold and tattoos and braids and jewels; they’re still at it. The universe as decoration, of course, comes from Black people, and the idea survives even after the ransacking and incineration of our libraries and palaces—the same very precise fractal geometry, unknown to Europeans for centuries, can be found underpinning ancient forms of adornment, like millennia-old Black hairstyles, but also in the architectural organisation of whole kingdoms, most famously the medieval Benin city and palace. (313)

For Erskine-Lily, indeed, their adornment is an embodied archive of Blackness that simultaneously suggests an anti-colonial form of archiving that queers dominator culture’s reliance on the material trace: according to dominator culture, ideas live or die by the survival of their material housing (libraries and palaces); here, instead, ideas survive through the body, through the repertoire, through ornament.

And yet, LOTE does not see alternative, embodied archival practices as radical in and of themselves. In the praxis of the insufferable Garreaux and his followers, the dry-toast-eating Thought Artists who are ‘emotionally, socially, or intellectually trapped in 2007’—a time when ‘[p]eople had said teleology, liminal and rhizomatic but not Queer or Black’ (234) and with whom ‘[p]rivilege discourse was practically impossible’ (377)—there is something of Taylor’s repertoire. Indeed, the Residency itself is a form of ritual that is enacted again and again as ‘an ongoing collective Thought Art performance piece to which each successive year of Residents contributed’ (159). As Erskine-Lily observes, however, Garreaux’s ‘yellow book [. . .] is [also] a kind of curse. A hex; against us, and Hermia. That’s what the Residency is…to keep them chanting the curse’ (368). In one sense this is the more general perpetuation of ‘a very recent history before the very recent transfiguration of a zeitgeist’ which makes Mathilda and her fellow Escape Artist, the Afrofuturist Utopian Malachi, feel ‘unaccountably queasy’ (234) on account of that very recent past being ‘a place where we had no power or language to describe our powerlessness’ (235; my italics). In other words, the yearly ritual of the Residency perpetuates a discourse that renders Mathilda and Malachi hermeneutically marginalised: their ‘social experiences [. . .] are left inadequately conceptualized and [thus] ill-understood, perhaps even by the subjects themselves’.⁴⁶ The yellow book, meanwhile, as the Residency’s ‘collective [form] of understanding’, is ‘structurally prejudicial in respect of content and/or style’ (6) in a way that Mathilda feels as visceral. From the violent chemical yellow of the book cover that puts Mathilda in ‘retinal hell’⁴⁷ to the ‘impenetrable’ language of the text, the Residency is fundamentally anti-aesthetic, anti-decorative, anti-ornamental, and anti-identity in a way that essentially weaponises tedium in the name of supposedly anti-Capitalist thought—‘a movement that viewed the production of art that negated the Self as efficiently negating Capitalism’ (158). It is, in other words, against the very embodied archives that Mathilda and Erskine-Lily understand themselves to be performing—the survival of a Queer, Black past that endures through Queer, Black performances of Beauty. Thought Art, then, is very much a tool of dominator culture as bell hooks understands it: ‘it allows for only one aspect of the system to be challenged at a time [. . .], allowing [some] critiques while silencing [others]’.⁴⁸

There is, of course, a sense in which von Reinhold is having an enormous amount of fun parodying ‘the worst of white Continental Theory as it intersects with Art-speak’.⁴⁹ However, there remains a sense in which Mathilda’s flippant critiques of the aesthetic violence of Thought Art insist that the aesthetic realm be taken seriously in the context of performance. As Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain writes, ‘flippancy itself [. . .] [is] a queer strategy’ that can enable writers ‘to react to their contexts without becoming trapped or enmeshed’, even ‘creating exit routes through extreme juxtaposition’⁵⁰ in ways that are not incompatible with the novel’s insistence on the necessity of a quick Escape. Mathilda’s horror of the Garreauxvians’ drab attire is rooted in an awareness of the role clothing plays in repeated and repeatable acts through which we participate in the creation and transmission of knowledge:

[E]very time a white straight man chose to step out in such generic trappings he was upholding—creating—the conditions for every time a visibly queer Queer stepped out and got attacked. Fine, if he was doing something else about it. Fine, even, if he was aware of it. Not fine if he thought it was some kind of capitalist drag. This was not Executive Realness.⁵¹

Indeed, that Mathilda’s appearance as an aesthetic expression of ornament as Queer/Black archive means that she is not taken seriously by the Garreauxvians is a further example of hermeneutic injustice: her ‘attempts at communication [. . .] are not heard as rational owing to [her] expressive style being inadequately understood’.⁵² Here, Fricker’s ‘style’ extends to Mathilda’s appearance, which, as has been established, is one that causes her to be read as a ‘Maniacal Black Person, who possesses no taste, only variations of a madness which comes down on her from on high’.⁵³ It seems that, through a perverse set of circumstances, the art of flippancy—like the embodied archival practices of the novel—is itself flipped and weaponised against Mathilda through the refusal of Garreaux himself to take her and Griselda seriously when they confront him with the book’s central erasure: the archiving of the life and works of Hermia Druitt.

It is this aspect of Thought Art as alternative archival praxis that, like the fact of the Thought Artists’ attire creating the conditions for physical violence against visibly queer people, enables the book’s supreme act of archival injustice. The Residency and its Archive are founded, as we discover, on the entombing of Hermia Druitt’s room and writings in a closed archive whose first ‘submission’ is Hermia’s lost modernist work, The Fainting Youth. Over the years, Residents submit their own work as part of the White Book Project, placing it in an archive where it will never be read, in what is apparently a supreme negation of self. Again, this act of epistemic violence—the erasure of a Black, trans-coded modernist poet from literary history—problematises both the ephemeral trace and the repertoire as modes of alterity that can be mobilised in the cause of queer justice. As Erskine-Lily observes, the Residency is essentially haunted: ‘No wonder these Residency people are so ghoulish. Look what’s worked into the foundations of their practice, even if they don’t know it, it’s there. These traces never leave.’ (353) And the traces do remain, insofar as the Residency perpetuates a literal act of submission: the Residents ‘submit’ again and again, quite literally preserving the dominator model. However, where the Residents choose to submit, Mathilda and Erskine-Lily are forced to conclude that Hermia ‘certainly didn’t submit willingly’ (353), having essentially been evicted by Garreaux.

Perhaps the most blatant appropriation of the discourse of the durability of the material trace, however, comes with Gareaux’s own view of this act of erasure:

The room became a submission. The first White book project. A symbol of all that the Principals are against, therefore, underwrites the Principles. I forced myself to take this thing opposite into me…this thing believed in by this elderly woman who’d known my father…this decadent cult she was a part of which repulsed me…offended on some level my virility—I was young. But that is exactly why I immersed myself in it, forced myself to love it, and then archived it as the first submission. It’s all there in the yellow book as well. Do you see now, how it is exactly what we need? It is the ultimate synthesis—a resolution to The Fissure which operates on us as we speak. Take that which alienates you—a foreign body—take it into you, then

• 1. Embed it

• 2. Seal it,

• 3. Synthesise it,

• and then

• 4. Watch the resolutions unfold.

Garreaux’s sense of his own practice, then, is as one that appropriates the durability of the ephemeral trace in order to perpetuate dominator culture and its systems—particularly those of white supremacy and patriarchy. Hermia’s work is ultimately preserved in a material archive without users, thus undermining its purpose as a place where we do things with objects. Although Mathilda and Erskine-Lily break into the archive precisely in order to transform the traces left behind by Hermia from artefacts into usable objects, Garreaux insists that his archiving of Hermia’s work is a radical archival practice in which a trace persists through ‘pure antithesis’. He claims to do so in a way that preserves Hermia through her otherness, positing her with supreme obnoxiousness as a ‘foreign body’. Griselda’s response is as brief and perfect as Garreaux’s is long-winded and sophistical: ‘That would all be fine if you hadn’t buried her existence in the process’ (429).

Creation/re-creation

If both traditional and alternative archival practices are prone to appropriation by dominator culture—if, as with Garreaux and Hermia Druitt, the process of creating an archive, whether material or embodied, can also be a means of erasure—then what forms of resistance remain? It is true that, in LOTE, archival practices based on affect are generally posited as an effective vehicle for queer justice, ultimately leading to the recovery of Hermia’s work. Likewise, embodied practices such as participation in acts of ornamentation or the recreation of ritual are also useful ripostes to dominator culture. However, as von Reinhold’s book attests, these are queer strategies that are no more immune to being appropriated in ways that uphold systems of domination than any other, particularly where they are not attentive to the way in which these systems are connected. This is not to suggest that these queer archival practices are to be abandoned, but rather that their use does not guarantee archival justice. In this final consideration of LOTE, I suggest that von Reinhold employs a form of resistance that, while perhaps even more open to abuse than these other strategies, represents a genuinely radical challenge to some of the core assumptions of what it means to enact archival justice. I am speaking here of creative writing as a form of queer archival praxis. Specifically—and somewhat paradoxically for a novel in which erasure is a form of epistemic injustice—von Reinhold suggests that it is through acts of both creative invention and erasure that a consent-based model of archival praxis emerges. It is a model that queers the logics of both material and embodied archives in that it essentially champions the archival subject’s right to choose to leave no trace, not through obliteration but through transformation.

This form of queer archival praxis is inherently linked to trans and gender-diverse (TGD) acts of creative self-determination via informed consent within the context of the novel. Although their experiences are not posited as being universal to the global TGD community and its richly complex cultural contingencies, the TGD-coded main characters of LOTE—Mathilda, Erskine-Lily, and (implicitly) Hermia herself—are all portrayed as what Mathilda calls ‘Escape artist[s]’ (374), with an emphasis on artistry. In a way that is almost directly antithetical to Thought Art, their multiple identities are not a form of self-abnegation but rather a form of self-affirmation in that they allow them to Escape from their ‘given lives’ (59). For Mathilda, ‘return to the world that had been so painstakingly constructed for me’ (73) is an intersectional inter-locking-up perpetuated by ‘[i]mmemorial gaolers’ (62) who ‘experience a dissonance in the occurrence of an Escape, and, whether consciously or not, wish to stop it’ (61). An example of this occurs early in the novel, when a trio of self-deprived 2007 people (who later turn up in the company of Garreaux), known as ‘Christian & Tom + Eleanor’ (58), call Mathilda by a name used for a previous Escape. This is, for Mathilda, ‘the sort of occurrence that suspends you forever in a momentary guise’—an archiving, of sorts—that leads to an ‘involuntary metamorphosis’ or ‘reversion’ (55): ‘From Mathilda to Morgana, Morgana to Mona, Mona to Temi, Temi to Sadie—but then I’d keep on unfurling, all the way to she who came first [. . .] Full autobiographical collapse on the train darling.’ (38–40) Crucially, for Mathilda, her Escapes are also flights from what she calls ‘the drabness that owned me before my first Escape’ (161). These ‘allergic’ reactions to ‘the architecture of [her] youth’ (37) manifest themselves as an antipathy that lingers in part due to the appropriation of the aesthetics of social deprivation by the privileged. Indeed, Mathilda identifies within herself a ‘sly aesthetic fascism that barred me from seeing any romance in the conditions of my birth before I was forced to see those conditions through [Tom & Christian + Eleanor’s] eyes’ (37). In this way, Mathilda’s distaste for ‘anything conspicuously utilitarian’ (37) is not only an extension of ‘[t]he classic impetus of working-class queer kidz’ to seek ‘queer and glittering new horizons’ (58) but also an aversion to the ethics of gentrification as manifested in its aesthetics. In this way, Mathilda’s ‘panging for the kind of ornament anathema to Christian & Tom + Eleanor’ (37) is part of a wider discourse articulated in a fictional provocation by fictional artist Anton Amo, ‘White People Shouldn’t Paint (or Write Novels, or Study Ancient Greek’ (182). It is here that von Reinhold, via her fictional artist, is able to argue that a given artform should not be ‘[pro]claimed dead before others have been able to glut themselves upon it, and in doing so, provide new insights’ (183; italics in original).

That Mathilda, Erskine-Lily, and Hermia in particular are portrayed as the artists of their own Escapes is highly suggestive. Indeed, it is arguably part of a wider strategy in LOTE whereby acts of creativity constitute an archival praxis of self-ID based on informed consent. This is, in effect, a creative response to tensions between hypervisibility and invisibility that exist in relation to queer and TGD populations across multiple fields of inquiry, from Muñoz’s performance-studies-based critique of the regime of rigour to the core considerations of what Linnet Taylor calls ‘data justice’. In the context of Big Data, for instance, there is seen to be a need to ‘reconcile datafied visibility with invisibility’ in a way that will ‘challenge [. . .] the established right of the state to count and intervene upon its citizens’.⁵⁴ Indeed, for TGD populations, this is not only a matter of the conditions under which epistemic injustice can be alleviated through memory work but also manifests itself as a tension between being visible enough to generate the data by which (for example) it is possible to link experiences of discrimination to TGD status⁵⁵ and invisible enough not to be singled out for state-sanctioned violence. In LOTE, both visibility and invisibility are encapsulated in creative acts of transformation, reinvention, and redaction that blend presence with absence and fiction with fact. Deadnames are omitted but present as blacked-out text, in an acknowledgement of histories of selfhood where information is shared only by consent. When ‘Mathilda’ and ‘Erskine-Lily’ meet again after Hector spitefully reveals Erskine-Lily’s deadname, moreover, it is as ‘Hermia’ and someone with a similar-sounding name in an implied act of recognising and being recognised, in which we observe them knowing one another by dress and lexical tics without negating one another’s Escapes. In other words, the Escape artists of LOTE are permitted to curate their own archives in an act that explicitly distances such acts of consensual curation from the violence of suppression. As Erskine-Lily notes, what they ‘adore about Hermia [Druitt]’ is her ability to ‘[blot] everything extraneous out of her life. Or rather it wasn’t blotting out, was it? It was simply living’.⁵⁶

It is in von Reinhold’s own creative praxis, however, that this blend of fact and fiction finds its fullest expression in the presence of archival absence. The invention of the poet Hermia Druitt is a process that von Reinhold describes in terms reminiscent of poet Padraig Regan’s interest in what it means to write queerly—a project that, for Regan, ‘necessitates a reconsideration of writing’s assumptions: instead of naming something, name its absence; instead of telling a story, withhold it’.⁵⁷ Similarly, von Reinhold writes:

‘[T]here is something in the idea of describing archival or other absences in as much detail as possible. [. . .] So that craving of the absence and being able to add shading to it set my own archival antennae to be really sensitive to those tiny glimpses of the absence usually in the form of various references to Black interwar modernists in Britain and these in turn allowed me to add more detail to this absence which was Hermia. So it felt like Hermia was born of all of these absences and then the subsequent presences that came out of the seeming absence. It felt like she fabulated herself out of the archive, she made herself. [. . .] I’ve spoken before about how when you name an absence or a void, more often than not something will spring out of it.’⁵⁸

This fabulation is only made possible, moreover, through archival access as affective encounter, in which the reader’s ‘archival antennae’ are attuned to the many possible interlocking meanings of absence. For von Reinhold, this is intimately linked with the possibility of Hermia’s transness:

There’s a particular point in Black Modernisms in which the author may have missed the possibility of Hermia’s transness: in the fictional appendix there is another archival finding of a young person who is given as ‘he’ and a working-class mixed-Black person from Saltcoats in Scotland who goes to Paris to study at the same school that Hermia is known to have studied at during the same period. The author of Black Modernisms could have come to the conclusion that this was the person later known as Hermia. But she doesn’t mention it. She misses it. I wanted to fold in this possibility—or actuality—that I didn’t want to be a plot twist, but instead closer to how someone might encounter transness in the archive[.]⁵⁹ (My italics)

Hermia, then, is a creation born out of encounters with archival absence—a person who never existed except as a reflection of desire; who exists as the articulation of that desire; whose creation is an assemblage that offers a means of self-knowledge and understanding in a way that is undiminished by her having been created; a dream of hermeneutic justice. In this respect, Hermia is no different from Mathilda’s other ‘Transfixions’—a blend of fact, fantasy, and fascination, some of whom are indeed, as Mathilda muses, ‘cusp-of-sleep confections, dredged up the next morning as truth’. Their reality matters less than their being ‘in part, vessels for something else’. Indeed, she even goes so far as to pose the question: ‘Did it matter if they had been real people?’⁶⁰ Later, with respect to Hermia, Mathilda offers something of an answer: ‘The prospect of Hermia being “made up” had awoken me to the possibility of the opposite: that not only was Hermia real, considerable efforts had been made a blanching her from history; unmaking her.’ (363)

It is this idea of creative praxis as a means of pursuing archival justice that is the ultimate significance of the Ritual to Summon a Luxury as Taylor’s repertoire. Mathilda, Erskine-Lily, and Griselda’s participation in the ritual is less a recreation than a re-creation, which is to say that they, like the Lote-Os, are participating in an imaginative act that blends archival interpretation with the articulation of a desire to insert themselves into a wider mythology going back to the people on whom the Lotus Eaters were apparently based. It is the act of summoning ancestors through the observance of our own desire. More than this: it is the act of re-creating the self in the image of imagined kin. Indeed, as part of the ritual, the participants catch glimpses of themselves and their surroundings in a mirror through the streaks of a tincture that is, queerly, both ‘Black and iridescent’ (439; italics in original), in a form of auto-suggestion that is like ‘seeing a face in the pattern of a curtain or a bird in a grain of wood’ (444). The Luxury that appears is described as a ‘giant photographic negative’ (445), again conjuring the imagery of a present absence, a chemical impression in lieu of positive, photographic evidence. They enter ‘Transfixionland’ (447) in a process that is explicitly linked to Mathilda’s and Malachi’s Escapes: ‘Making a Luxury appear before you was a sign of having conquered the grim imposition of reality. Of having embraced fantasy. It was like a rareified, and thus headier, form of the Escape Malachi and I had devised.’ (409)

In this way, the ritual suggested by Hermia’s writings is the inheritance of the practices by which she and her spiritual descendants are able to re-create themselves. There is even a suggestion that the process is in some way reciprocal: as Mathilda yearns for ancestors, Hermia is described as having ‘pined’ for the future: ‘The Glittering Proletariat, skin perhaps as dark as her mother’s would have been.’ (373) There is even the possibility that the sudden switch to third-person in the passage in which the ritual is enacted may be some narrative expression of Hermia having desired a future self into being, just as Mathilda—who ends the book calling herself Hermia—has desired a past self into life. Again, these inherited rituals of transformation across time and space and absence are implicitly linked to intersectional queerness and implied gender non-conformity. Hermia and Mathilda’s reinventions are, as von Reinhold puts it, ‘a wider strategy of survival in relation to [. . .] queerness, race and class and other relations to the world’.⁶¹ And, while it is important that Hermia’s work survives, it is perhaps more important that the strategies for transformation as practiced by herself and the Lote-Os are made transmissible. It is through such strategies that new possibilities are made incarnate and that archival injustices might, at the very least, be circumvented, if not redressed, through the invention of past, present, and future selves through which we might fabulate new frameworks of understanding.

Creative praxis as archival intervention

Shola von Reinhold’s invention of Hermia is, like Hermia’s ritual to summon a Luxury, an extended practise of summoning a queer writer from the archive. Hermia’s factuality is less important than the processes by which a writer like Hermia might emerge from absence, obsession, affect, and reciprocity. In ‘Creative Writing Praxis as Queer Becoming’, Dallas John Baker cites John Ambrosio’s definition of writing as ‘a technology of ethical self-formation that views the subject as a work of art and the self as an artefact, as an ongoing work in progress’.⁶² In this context, queer writing as ‘a set of entwined practices including research, creative writing, reflexivity, engagement with theory and a critique of subjectivity’⁶³ is capable of ‘[providing] “models” of gender and sexual subjectivity that strongly influence the on-going becoming of Queer subjectivities’ (372). I have suggested here that, for von Reinhold, creative writing praxis is also an archival practice, wherein the creation of queer histories through articulating archival absence is also a crucial aspect of influencing queer subjectivities. It is a mode of ‘self-bricolage’, moreover, in which affective encounter is key and is characterised by a form of reciprocity that extends beyond LOTE into other literary works in which creative writing is a form of archival intervention. As Jenny Sharpe notes, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! posits ‘silences in official archives’ not as ‘holes to be filled with meaning’ but rather as ‘spaces of an affective relationship with the past’.⁶⁴ Jay Bernard’s author’s note for Surge concludes with the evocative phrase, ‘I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back’.⁶⁵ Claudia Rankine, flooded with sensations of ‘disgrace’, feels herself to be ‘stain[ed]’ by the words of Thomas Jefferson: ‘Erasure is no longer an option. I begin to write across time’.⁶⁶ In Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), Rankine includes sections of Jefferson’s ‘On the State of Virginia’ with blocks of text erased so that white space surrounds stark examples of his racism. ‘What lives in the encounter?’⁶⁷ she asks. LOTE is a novel in which the answer to this question might well be ‘possibility’ itself. It is in encountering archival traces and naming archival absences that we become alive to the possibility of archival presences. As Mathilda understands with regard to Hermia, it is in the possibility of invention that the possibility of reality suggests itself. To return to Muñoz one last time, the future may well be ‘queerness’s domain’, but that ‘mode of desiring’ that orients us towards ‘the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality’⁶⁸ is not only Utopian. By virtue of the desire for a queer past that imbues the no-longer with the same potentiality as it does the horizon of the not-yet, it is also, as LOTE suggests, Arcadian.