The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, a new book by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, an assistant professor of literatures in English, will be published by the University of Illinois Press this October. The book is part of UIP's The New Black Studies Series, which highlights innovative scholarly works on Black theory and culture.
From the Publisher
"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."
Sullivan's scholarly and critical work has been published in American Quarterly; Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender, and the Black International; The Scholar and Feminist; American Literary History; and others, and has received fellowship support from the SSRC, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. Her fiction publications include work in Best New Writing, American Fiction, Callaloo, and others, and her creative work has received honors from Bread Loaf, Yaddo, The Center for Fiction, and the NEA. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Blue Talk and Love (Riverdale Ave 2015), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for fiction.