consciously multicultural post-colonial countries. Thus their queer work, which seeks to redeem the anti-colonial struggle, is, to borrow the title of a recent Arcus Operating Foundation report that surveyed the field, at once about Saving Lives, Promoting Democracy, Alleviating Poverty, and Fighting AIDS (Galst, 2010). Uninvited interventions by radical black feminists in black politics, arts and letters demonstrated that submerged, discredited or 'alternative' knowledges, produced in the interstices of violence, silence, invisibility or forgetting, exposed a wider horizon of possibilities than had been imagined previously (Combahee River Collective, 1986; Ferguson, 2004; Clarke, 1983 [2000], pp. 197-208; Simmons, 1983 [2007]). The black/queer/diaspora project takes up this challenge to develop a synthetic vision and methodology of diasporic black queer futurity. We have taken up the work that Cathy J. Cohen has challenged us to do, shifting research agendas to understand and meet the urgent demands of those who are multiply vulnerable. Furthermore, we are following M. Jacqui Alexander's proposal that the key epistemological aim of our work should be to think/live/write contradictions of genre, discipline, materiality, spirituality and affect, all at once (Alexander, 2007, pp. 154-166).