ENGL 7140-01: Global Black Feminist Poetics

Professor Mecca Sullivan

Section Description: This seminar explores the formal, aesthetic, and poetic innovations of Black feminist writers of the African diaspora. Through an intersectional perspective emphasizing Black queer and feminist theoretical frameworks, we will examine connections between formal subversion and visions of identity and liberation that emerge within various feminist, anticolonial, and antiracist political discourses of the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore poetry, plays, novels, films and mixed-genre works by a range of West African, South African, North American, Caribbean, and Afro-European writers including Dionne Brand, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ama Ata Aidoo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Bessie Head, Olumide Popoola, Akilah Oliver and others. We will consider these works alongside key theoretical texts in Black feminism and poetics by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Sokari Ekine, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Akwaeke Emezi and others. Reading for the interfaces of the poetic and the political, we will consider the roles of formal subversion and genre invention in contemporary Black feminist aesthetics, and how these writers’ works contribute to discourses of identity, power, and freedom on a global scale.