“Vile Matter”

Abstract

Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021) can be read as a Gothic novel about Black trauma, and while this is certainly true, such an assessment overlooks its anarchist dimension and emancipatory potential. As articulated by Solomon, Black anarchism overcomes the limitations of white, European anarchism from within by contesting its attachment to the dualisms of modernity: as in New Materialist philosophies, the boundaries between human and nonhuman, and living and dead matter, are blurred. Through its queer Black protagonist, Vern, and her alliance with her Indigenous lover, Gogo, Sorrowland attacks the modernist drive to classify everything into strict dichotomies—a process which inevitably also seeks racial and sexual “purity.”