Poetics of Difference

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

• CoverTitle PageCopyrightContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction. Black Queer Feminist Poetics: Rereading the IntersectionChapter One. Biomythic Times: Voice, Genre, and the Invention of Black/Queer HistoryChapter Two. "walkin on the edges of the galaxy": Queer Choreopoetic Thought in the African DiasporaChapter Three. Feeling Colors and Seeing Speech: Body/Language and Black Women's Diasporas ofChapter Four. "Languages of Love": "TALK" of Sex: Interstitial Idioms of Body and DesireCoda. Speech between Silence: Distance, Difference, and the Queer Poetics of Blackwoman LivingNotesWorks CitedIndexBack cover

"Dr. Sullivan provides expert analysis of the complex queer creativities of Black women and their (re)inventions and (re)imaginings of meaning-making in vast literary forms. " --Ms. Magazine"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