'In spite of, to spite': Trans Figuring in Shola von Reinhold's LOTE (2020)

This essay argues that Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE explores Black-queer-trans history, art and aesthetics to challenge hegemonic discourses of identity and culture. The novel employs a camp aesthetic and foregrounds themes of decadence to imagine the potential of a radical transness beyond the fixed stability of binarised being. The text makes oblique connections with Scotland and encourages reflection on problematic aspects of Scottish history and culture in promoting openness to change and otherness. Von Reinhold stages the unearthing and recovery of Black, queer and trans history and culture through imagining Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt who is discovered through the archival activism of her contemporary acolyte, the narrator Mathilde. In this the novel resonates with the work of Saidiya Hartman in her innovative book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, in ‘fabulating into an absence’ to reconstruct marginal lives and histories from archival traces. LOTE’s narrative matches a capricious structure with profound historical, political and philosophical themes, to examine issues of race, aesthetics and the significance of cultural archives and their control.