"Contemporary black women writers of 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 (such as Audre Lorde's 1982 "biomythography," Zami, Ntozake Shange's 1975 "choreopoem," for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf, and Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo's 1977 prosepoem novella, Our Sister Killjoy) and more recent examples of black feminist experimentalism in the diaspora, such as those by queer Trinidadian poet and novelist Dionne Brand, South African lesbian photographer Zanele Muholi, African-American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and Afro-Cuban lesbian hip-hop duo Las Krudas Cubensi. Reading these artists' works through a black queer feminist frame attentive to queerness as a matter of both formal heterogeneity and identity difference shows that these artists use subversive poetics to contest dominant models of sexuality, gender, and political subjectivity in the African Diaspora"--

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction. Black Queer Feminist Poetics: Rereading the Intersection

Chapter One. Biomythic Times: Voice, Genre, and the Invention of Black/Queer History

Chapter Two. "walkin on the edges of the galaxy": Queer Choreopoetic Thought in the African Diaspora

Chapter Three. Feeling Colors and Seeing Speech: Body/Language and Black Women's Diasporas of

Chapter Four. "Languages of Love": "TALK" of Sex: Interstitial Idioms of Body and Desire

Coda. Speech between Silence: Distance, Difference, and the Queer Poetics of Blackwoman Living

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Back cover

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is an assistant professor of English at Bryn Mawr and the author of Blue Talk and Love.