MARVELLOUS GROUNDS

“Marvellous Grounds is a beautiful gathering of QTBIPOC artists, organizers, activists, and cultural workers that achieve the Morrisonian [Toni Morrison’s] task of creating a map outside of the mandates of conquest, specifically its homonormative archival practices. Speaking across time and space, the Marvellous Grounds collective lovingly curates visual art, prose, intimate conversations and tender caresses taking place on Toronto’s street corners that have the potential to heal both the ancestors and the generations yet to come. Creating marvelous ground in Toronto, this stunning collection resists inclusion into normative and homonationalist queer Canadian archives. It also refuses to help repair this archive. Instead, Marvellous Grounds beautifully disfigures the colonial project of archiving as it yearns and reaches for what the co-editors call “the something yet-to-be-done.” Marvellous Grounds is a healing praxis that QTBIPOC communities can bask in as they soak up the sweet balm it tenders. This collection is a gift.”

—Tiffany King, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Georgia State University

“As the lead singer of the radical duo LAL and co-organizer of the DIY QT2S/BIPOC space, Unit 2, I am so happy to see this important book that highlights some of the amazing work and stories by QTBIPOC/friends in Toronto. More than half of the contributors have shared space or gathered at Unit 2, so this book resonates in my body and soul. Marvellous Grounds is a necessary piece of writing that documents and helps keep our stories alive, in a way that is for us by us. This book will share important perspectives with a new generation of QTBIPOCs and friends, while honouring the stories, people, and places that fought and fight for justice and freedom, in this amazing but complicated meeting place, Toronto.”

—Rosina Kazi, LAL / UNIT 2

“The authors, artists, and activists gathered in this extraordinary book invoke an insurgent and untameable queer and trans history, one which confronts both co-option and self-congratulation. Boldly making space for the silenced, criminalized, and displaced voices of queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC), Marvellous Grounds disrupts queer nostalgia, complacency, and white fragility, and testifies to QTBIPOC resilience, resistance, and healing. Whether you come to this book in search of a radically transformative decolonial theory and praxis, or to reclaim a displaced queer/trans lineage, these stories are guaranteed to move, challenge, and inspire.”

—Julia Chinyere Oparah, provost, dean of the faculty, and professor of ethnic studies, Mills College and author of Birthing Justice, Battling Over Birth, Activist Scholarship, and Global Lockdown

“Marvellous Grounds is an incredibly important critical intervention into the ongoing creation and theorization of queer counter archives and their frequent whitewashing. The artists/activists/academics whose work is collected here offer a multilayered, sharp, original, and touching take on queer Toronto past and present that will be relevant to scholars and practitioners far beyond the local context.”

—Fatima El-Tayeb, professor of literature and ethnic studies, University of California, San Diego

“Upending white supremacist, neoliberal narratives of ‘gay progress,’ Marvellous Grounds shows us Toronto’s QTBIPOC communities surviving and thriving in the midst of violent forces of erasure. The essays, dialogues, and creative interventions gathered here offer an invitation to remember and learn from rich and resplendent stories—of organizing and activism, of dance parties, reading groups, performances, and everyday life. This is the history we want and the history we need.”

—Craig Willse, author of The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in the United States

“Marvellous Grounds describes a Toronto that makes sense and feels right. It doesn’t suffer from impossible racial homogeneity or glib hollow triumph. This gentle, trusting, personal collection lingers over homelessness, racial profiling, protest, worship, and the struggle of queers of colour starting families, and so is a Toronto origin story that feels real.”

—Elisha Lim, M.A., M.F.A., graphic novelist, 100 Crushes

“Marvellous Grounds is a compelling and transformative site of queer of colour creation and ongoing creativity, collectively confronting and refusing dominant white queer archives. Together, the essays build queer counter-archives as their own form, where writing and genealogies of thought emerge in collective organizing, art practices, abolitionist work, disability justice, poetics, healing justice, performance, anti-racism, and spirituality. In this long-awaited anthology, the authors make possible the kinds of depth and life that come from an effort to pause, and take hold of what emerges in our struggles to find new ways of being with one’s self and amongst others.”

—Lee Ann S. Wang, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington Bothell

“Marvellous Grounds is a foundational book for gender, queer, postcolonial, and critical race scholarship. Archiving and reflecting on four decades of queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC) historiography, collective organizing, cartographies of violence and building communities of care and healing in the city of Toronto, this inspiring book is a must-read for activists, artists, and academics alike who radically question who the subject of queer history is and more importantly dare to ask “What kind of ancestor do I want to be?”

—Onur Suzan Nobrega, Institute of Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany.