The poetics of difference

Diaspora / Feministische Theorie / Literaturwissenschaft / Queer-Theorie / Schriftstellerin / Schwarze Frau / Sexualität

From Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, and Bessie Head, to Zanele Muholi, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Missy Elliott, black women writers and artists across the African Diaspora have developed rich, nuanced, and complex literary forms through which to explore social, political, and erotic experience. Since the height of the post-civil rights and decolonialization movements of the late-twentieth century, black women writers of the diaspora have actively engaged in a politically rooted experimentalism that has reached broad audiences and produced iconic texts in both popular and academic intellectual spheres across the globe. This project explores the social and political resonances of African Diaspora women artists‘ experimental and formally subversive works. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan draws links between important genre-bending texts of the late-twentieth century and more recent examples of black feminist experimentalism in the diaspora.