In academic book reviews there is an unstated rule that dictates that one should always find something to criticize. If you have not read the book carefully you might not have something critical to add; however, since you do have something critical to add, then you've clearly read the work thoughtfully and carefully. In this sense, book reviews are often more about “the reviewer” than about the book. So, at the risk of opening myself to the charge of not having carefully read Ernesto Martinez's On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility, I submit that it is both brilliant and as near to flawless as I can imagine a book to be. It is a book that is both theoretical and pedagogical in the most generous sense of both terms for it refuses to shy away from the thorny, complex theoretical problems of identity while remaining crystal clear in its assertions.

At heart, Martinez's book is about the systems and structures of oppression that queer communities of color contend with in their efforts to be understood as important and essential sources of knowledge about their own communities, or, as Martinez puts it, “the everyday labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others” (14). Martinez explores this everyday labor via five elegantly spun, and in some cases deeply moving, chapters focussing on writers as diverse as Toni Morrison, Manuel Muñoz, James Baldwin and the comedian Margaret Cho. On Making Sense analyzes topics as contentious as the use and misuse of writers of color by antirealist and postmodern scholars, especially white feminists like Judith Butler; the efforts by communities of color to enunciate self-knowledge in oppressive, homophobic and racist environments; the recognition and acknowledgment of the “spatial practices of resistance and survival” (79) and their relation to the search for autonomous identity practices among queer communities of color; and the purposeful shifting of queer narratives from queers of color to the various populations, or what Martinez refers to as “the web of relationships and discourses,” implicated in the purposeful, collective creation of queer identities (113).

It is, in my modest estimation, hard not to walk away from this book without having learned something substantial about the flawed social world we inhabit and the need to continue to address the misguided logic upon which it has been built and rebuilt. I can envision this book having an impact on the work of scholars of race and sexuality, but also on classrooms of graduate and even undergraduate students. However, Dr. Martinez's book will not, I imagine, be everyone's cup of tea. There are those, raised (nurtured?) on a steady diet of post-structuralism and deconstructionism, who will find it difficult, if not impossible, to get past the first twenty pages or so. Predisposed as they are to be against the possibility that identity can be anything other than a misleading fiction, they will dismiss Martinez's book, and his assertions regarding the epistemic salience of identities, out of hand as merely more “identity politics.” This is unfortunate – for them – because On Making Sense was very much written to speak to them, to interrogate the presumptions about the value of identity. It was not, however, written for them in that Martinez has a very clear conceptualization of who his people are. This book is, instead, for the various queer communities of color who have struggled to have their voices heard and to have their theories about our shared social world taken seriously, in meaningful ways. It is for those, queer or not, who have known, for a long, long while, that their experiences have concrete explanatory potential, that the identities that have been forged out of oppression and resistance, sorrow and struggle, mean something. Most importantly, perhaps, Martinez's book demands that we place a coherent value on these identities precisely because of his assertion that they function as social theories that can lead us to a verifiable, more concrete truth about our shared social world.

Thus, in a historical moment where Tea Party protestors angrily decry politically correct speech as “fascism” and where efforts to underscore the continued salience of racism are categorically belittled as “playing the race card,” Martinez's book reminds us, in clear, purposeful terms, of the daily struggles of queer communities of color. His book reminds us that these daily struggles are not merely for acceptance or recognition, but rather assertions against the epistemic injustice of silencing. They are struggles over the right to be understood as legitimate producers of knowledge about themselves, yes, but they are also struggles about, and for, the larger world we all collectively inhabit and construct, the long-deferred dream of a just, equitable society.