Death and the nation's subjects -- Bakulu discourse: bodies made "flesh" in Toni Morrison's Beloved -- Telling the story of genocide in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the dead -- (Pro)creating in imaginative spaces and other queer acts: Randall Kenan's A visitation of spirits and its revival of James Baldwin's absent Black gay man in Giovanni's room -- "From this moment forth, we are Black lesbians": querying feminism and killing the self in Consolidated's Business of punishment -- Critical conversations at the boundary between life and death.