Women, Gender, Sexuality 792AD - S-African Diaspora Fem Poetics

This course will explore the formal, aesthetic, and poetic innovations of black feminist writers of the African diaspora. Emphasizing the works of diasporic women writers from 1968 on, we will examine connections between formal subversion and rhetorics of identity and liberation that emerge within various feminist, anticolonial, and antiracist political discourses. We will take up the works of West African, South African, North American, and Caribbean writers including Ntozake Shange, Buchi Emecheta, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ama Ata Aidoo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Harryette Mullen, Tiphanie Yanique, Akilah Oliver and others. We will explore these works through both key theoretical texts in African diaspora feminism (including those by `Molara Ogundipe Leslie, Abena Busia, and Patricia Hill Collins, and Evelynn Hammonds) and modern and contemporary poetics (such as work by Mae G. Henderson, Elizabeth Alexander, Evie Shockley and others) to examine Afrodiasporic women writers' contributions to conceptions of feminist, queer, diasporic and other literary aesthetics. Reading for the interfaces of the poetic and the political, we will consider the roles of formal subversion and generic invention in contemporary African diaspora feminist literary and cultural expression.

Restricted to graduate students. Interested graduate students should contact instructor.