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.