What if, instead of overcoming grief, we learned to live with it? Unfinished Grief invites readers to linger within loss and to understand mourning not as an endpoint, but as a mode of relation, continuance, and care. In this lyrical follow-up to his acclaimed After the Party, Joshua Chambers-Letson turns toward the art and theory of grief as a way of imagining queer survival. Drawing from queer of color critique, performance studies, Asian American studies, and Black studies, Chambers-Letson explores how love and loss are inseparable conditions of queer life. Engaging artists including Yoko Ono, Gertrude Stein, Bimbola Akinbola, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joshua Rains, and Kia LaBeija, he considers the lessons art and performance teach about living with what remains unfinished. Set against the backdrop of public and private catastrophe, from war and pandemics to the ravages of racial capitalism, Unfinished Grief insists that mourning and political struggle are entwined practices. Through sensuous, reflective prose and a deeply personal critical voice, Chambers-Letson reveals how grief can be both a sustaining and shattering site of vulnerability, creativity, and communal becoming. Intimate, meditative, and defiantly alive, Unfinished Grief reflects on the queer art of mourning in this guide to the beautiful, difficult work of staying with loss and finding life within it.
Joshua Chambers-Letson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University and author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018).
"Erudite, brilliant, and personally vulnerable (without capsizing into sentimentality), Queer Love and Loss reroutes conversations about queer of color life. Tracking grief's looping trajectories and breathtakingly demonstrating the reparative's alliance with whiteness, this volume argues that love is about staying with brokenness. Here is theory made not only for thinking, but also, and especially, for living." - Avgi Saketopoulou, author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia "In this lyrical, moving, textually performative and theoretically inspiring work, Joshua Chambers-Letson continues to deepen our understandings of queer and BIPOC love, loss, grief, and the "living on" of remembrance, survival, and More Life. Spotlighting the work of BIPOC, queer and trans artists who stage an art of breaking down, of queer continuance, of looping rather than linear time, this book gifts us with a brilliant analysis of theoretical debates on reparation, depression, paranoia, and melancholia, and offers overwhelm/ shattering as potential portals to an art of breaking down that might foster queer continuance. Unfinished Grief is a tribute to the ways we might sustain each other, in moments of beauty and pleasure, never forgetting those we love and have lost, living on amid so much that would kill us." - Dorinne Kondo, University of Southern California
