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This first collection of fiction by Anjana Appachana provides stories that are beautifully written, the characters in them carefully and respectfully drawn. All the stories are set in India, but the people in them seem somehow displaced within their own society—a society in transition but a transition that does not come fast enough to help them. Appachana manages to capture the pervasive humor, poignancy, and self-delusion of the lives of the people she observes, but she does so without seeming to pass judgments on them. She focuses on unexpected moments, as if catching her characters off guard, lovingly exposing the fragile surfaces of respectability and convention that are so much a part of every society, but particularly strong in India, with its caste system, gender privileges, and omnipresent bureaucracies.

All life seems to be prescribed; these characters bravely or cautiously confront the rules and regulations or finally give in to them resignedly—any small triumphs they achieve are never clear-cut. One of the most unusual aspects of many of the stories is the way in which they are informed by but never ruled by the author's feminism. She never lectures her readers but lets us see for ourselves: a bride caught in a hopeless marriage where she has given up all rights to any life of her own, a hapless college student who is confined to campus for minor infractions just at the time when she had an appointment for an abortion, a young girl who keeps the dark secret of her sister's rape, a woman executive and a digruntled male clerk both trapped in the intricate bureaucracy of their business firm and the roles they must play to survive there. By turns warm, gullible, arrogant and bigoted, all of these characters live their lives amid contradictions and double standards, superstitions and impossible dreams. Appachana's vision is unique, her writing superb. Readers will thank her for allowing them to enter territory that is at once distant and exotic but also familiar and recognizable.

A long-overdue analysis of how Black lesbians have asserted their lived experience through creative practice, pushing back against heteropatriarchal systems that deny them visibility.

“We Must Document Ourselves Now” examines the essential but oft-ignored importance of Black lesbian literature and film in queer literary and film histories, arguing that Black lesbian cultural texts reflect creators’ lived experiences and resist the heteropatriarchal systems that deny Black lesbians visibility in popular culture. Stephanie Andrea Allen contends that these texts have three goals: to lay bare the experiences of Black lesbians in a raced, gendered, classed, and homophobic society; to challenge the notion that claiming Black lesbian identity is marginal or forbidden; and to take care of Black lesbians by bearing witness to their experiences through creative practice.

Insisting that Black feminist creative practice is an integral form of self and community care, Allen weaves analysis of cultural output spanning key sociocultural moments from 1974 to 2020 with interviews with Black lesbian cultural workers. “We Must Document Ourselves Now” examines the Black Arts / Black Power movement, the “boom” in lesbian and gay publishing, the so-called golden era of Black film, and twenty-first-century visual media to demonstrate how representations of Black lesbians, or lack thereof, were vital to constructing a cultural canon that focused on illuminating Black lesbian experiences in the United States.