"Feelin Colors and Seeing Speech: Diasporas of Difference in Black Women's Literature"

This paper explores radical fusions of body and voice in black women writers' creative explorations of diaspora. Focusing on the works of black lesbain Canadian poet Akilah Oliver, lesser-known works by American poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, and the work of queer Afro-Cuban hip-hop group Las Krudas Cubensi, I argue that these writers' formal meldings of body and voice articulate a project of black queer feminist worldmaking that makes the complexities of global blackness visible, and thus forges space for more expansive models of Afrodiaspora.

Reading black women's creative texts alongside prominent theories of black transnational identification and recent conceptions of feminist diaspora, we will consider several key questions: How do black women writers use poetic form to rethink diaspora on the page, the stage, and in other textual spaces? How do queer recastings of embodiment animate these processes? What do black women's poetic constructions of diaspora reveal about diaspora's capacities as a framework for understanding difference?

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst. Her research explores poetics and difference in Afrodiasporic women's literatures and cultures. Her current manuscript, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, considers the political resonances of experimental forms in contemporary Afrodiasporic women's literatures and cultures.