Up until recently, queerness has been the blindspot of Blackness (cf. Muñoz 1999, Keeling 2019, Tinsley 2008). Nyong’o asserts that afro-fabulation is a way to make sense of the “paradoxical vibrance” and critical fabulative efforts made by Black queer subjects resisting erasure. Remaining attentive to fabulative strategies in Black queer cultural forms of production is a gesture that re-casts these absences and creates insulation from the spaces of injury that envelop Black queer subjects (Avilez 2020). Desire, as Audre Lorde (1984) posits, is a kernel that grows in the subject to eventually blossom into deep understanding. This panel grounds this fabulative work in desire. While queer desire is often the source and cause for injury in dominant culture and from the Black parallel public (cf. Spence 2011), it is also central to queer identity and expresses emancipatory narratives for Black queer subjects; desire is a third pole that complicates the binary forces of repetition and resistance and creates opportunities to imagine and build alternative spaces of community.

The papers in this panel each centre desire as the engine of afro-fabulation. We will begin with Frederick Cherry Jr.’s “A Criticism of Resonance: Hemphill’s Regrets and Miller’s Augmentations,” to frame an understanding of the ways contemporary texts can respond to their historical antecedents. In staging a relationship between Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (1992), and Kevin R. Miller’s young adult novel Pritty (2023) and the sequel Togetha (2025), Cherry theorizes a “criticism of resonance” to thread a connection of relation between the black queer literary past and black queer contemporary through themes of black male relations and explorations of intimacy.

Similarly, Lizette London extends this transhistorical meditation in her consideration of Black lesbian archives in “Si/gh/ted Memory: Exploring Cheryl Dunye’s Fae Richards and Queer Visuality,” where she returns to Cheryl Dunye’s iconic 1996 film The Watermelon Woman to draw attention to the ways in which its attendant fabulated archive, “The Fae Richards Photo Archive”–photographed and produced by Zoe Leonard, not only supplements a crucial reference of imagined memory for Dunye and the film itself, but informs the transformative visual-aesthetic and spatiotemporal possibilities of self- and collective Black lesbian imagistic desire.

In “Black Narcissus,” nigel lezama redirects the trajectory of Black queer desire toward the self to expand psychoanalytic discourse, which has problematically universalized human subjectivity without accounting for its fragmentation through race in the west. Inspired by Spillers call to reflect on the limits of psychoanalysis and race, lezama will explore the theoretical application of the narcissistic drive for understanding the drag self-portraits of the contemporary Black American artist Devan Shimoyama. lezama proposes that desire directed to the self–narcissistic libido, in the field’s jargon–is both apotropaic and world-making for Black queer subjects.

London and lezama are the organizers of the panel. They met at a conference in Fall 2025, entitled “The Audacity of Pleasure: Race, Aesthetics and the Politics of Desire,” which brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to share research in Blackness and desire. At the 2026 MLA convention, the well-attended panel “Black Literary Study, a Predicament of History” posed a question about the scholar’s ethics in the exegesis of Black American texts. “Black Queer Representations. Desire, Afro-Fabulation, and Dreaming of Freedom” proposes an answer to this question by aligning Blackness and queerness in order to draw out the necessary ethics of reading. Importantly, the panel brings together scholars at different career stages and from different fields. In this way, the panel centres diverse perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Black queer cultural production and its fabulative potential.