The Poetics of Difference
Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora
By Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
University of Illinois Press (2021)
Winner of the 2023 William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association
Black women artists, writers, and performers, and their theories of intersectionality
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.
"This book is a vital, gorgeous thing. Sullivan's thinking elegantly explores the ways black women writers use genre as a queer practice of difference. The argument here is stunning--transcendently so--and it is not an exaggeration to say that this book will become canonical."--Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being
"This luminous book lovingly parses the poetics of difference that forms and informs the continued life of black queer feminist thought in many genres. The work is brilliant and bracing."--Jennifer DeVere Brody, author of Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play
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Cover art by Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, and winner of the 2018 Judith Markowitz Award for LGBTQ Writers, and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021), which explores the politics of experiment in global Black feminist art, literature, and hip-hop. In her creative and scholarly work, she considers the links between language, imagination, and bodily life in Black queer and feminist experience. Her stories and essays have appeared in Best New Writing, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, American Literary History, The Scholar and Feminist, American Quarterly, Public Books, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, BET.com, and others. She has earned support and honors from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Professor of English at Georgetown University. Her novel, Big Girl, will be published by W.W. Norton/Liveright this summer.