The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780252086038)

Winner of the Modern Language Association (MLA)'s William Sanders Scarborough Prize

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 nuanced and complex creative forms. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan ventures into the unexplored spaces of black women's queer creative theorizing to learn its languages and read the textures of its forms. Moving beyond fixed notions, Sullivan points to a space of queer imagination where black women invent new languages, spaces, and genres to speak the many names of difference. Black women's literary cultures have long theorized the complexities surrounding nation and class, the indeterminacy of gender and race, and the multiple meanings of sexuality. Yet their ideas and work remain obscure in the face of indifference from Western scholarship.

Innovative and timely, The Poetics of Difference illuminates understudied queer contours of black women's writing.

Author: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
ISBN-10: 0252086031
ISBN-13: 9780252086038
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Language: English
Published: 10/12/2021
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 9.13h x 6.06w x 0.71d