Exploring Queer Feminist Forms in The African Diaspora: An Interview with Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
By emerald faith
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s new book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, offers a mapping of an alternative history of intersectionality that takes seriously the theoretical contributions and impact of Black queer feminisms.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the new book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021). She is also the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (Riverdale Avenue Books 2015), winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary.
Sullivan is currently a Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, where she teaches courses in African American poetry and poetics, black feminist literature, and creative writing. In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College.
Her short stories have appeared in Best New Writing, American Fiction: Best New Stories by Emerging Writers, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing and many others. A 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Glenna Luschei Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, the 2021 Pride Index Esteem Award, and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Lambda Literary, the Publishing Triangle, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received an inaugural Emerging Writers Fellowship.
A proud native of Harlem, NY, Sullivan’s critical and scholarly work on sexuality, identity, and poetics in contemporary African Diaspora culture has appeared in American Literary History, The Scholar and Feminist, American Quarterly, College Literature, Oxford African American Resource Center, Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, and many others. Her research and scholarship have earned support from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, Rutgers University, Duke University, and the American Academy of University Women.
In September 2021, I spoke with Dr. Sullivan about her new book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, the impact of her creative writing experience on her theoretical interventions, her understanding of Black queer feminist literary politics, and the intimacy of archival work. I was excited to talk with Dr. Sullivan about what I understand to be one of the key historical and theoretical interventions of her work–a mapping of an alternative history of intersectionality that takes seriously the theoretical contributions and impact of Black women’s storytelling traditions and literary production of the late 20th century on intersectionality.
emerald faith (ef): In your book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, you map a different history of intersectionality, one that situates it within Black women’s storytelling traditions and literary production of the late 20th century more broadly, which you argue goes underexplored. How do you think this gap in the scholarship, in which your book intervenes, relates to what some scholars see as the limitations of intersectionality as a critical framework?
“When Black feminist artists theorize race and gender, we are also theorizing class, sexuality, nation, language, embodiment, disability, and much more. We are theorizing difference itself.”
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (MJS): I do think there’s an important connection here. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 to describe the interconnectedness of race and gender—and of structural racism and sexism—in Black women’s experience. She goes on to name the place of class, sexuality, and other nodes of difference and power in this dynamic. And yet, as a concept, what we now term “intersectionality” has had many lives. Black women have been theorizing race and gender as long as we’ve been writing. In the U.S. context, the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 Black Feminist Statement names the interconnectedness of racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism as a key starting point for Black feminist analysis.
Throughout the African diaspora, writers like Bessie Head, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others have done similar theorizing in their creative work. I argue that those critiques have often extended beyond “race” and “gender” as discreet, fixed, stable categories, particularly in the works of creative writers and artists. When we look at the invention of new genres, for example, like Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf in 1975 or Audre Lorde’s “biomythography”Zami in 1982, I argue that we can’t separate these creative choices from the critiques of race, gender, class, sexuality, nation, and ability that these texts take up.
For these writers, talking about Black women’s experiences means talking about multiple connected experiences of difference and power, and it means doing so in new, different forms. Some critiques of intersectionality argue that it overemphasizes a particular notion of “Black womanhood” in its understandings of race and gender, and that it thus subordinates other machinations of global power. Yet these critiques—particularly those that focus mostly on social science contexts and methodologies—miss the breadth and complexity of the theorizing that happens in Black feminist art and literature of the diaspora. When Black feminist artists theorize race and gender, we are also theorizing class, sexuality, nation, language, embodiment, disability, and much more. We are theorizing difference itself.
ef: Building off the previous question, you write about how even as scholars and literary critics acknowledge folks like Cheryl Clarke, Alice Walker, and June Jordan as theorists in their own right, “the impact of their art on their theories of difference has yet to be explored.” Could you talk about how your own experience as a creative writer impacts and informs how you theorize key concepts like poetics of difference, interstitial languages, and interstitial hermeneutics in The Poetics of Difference?
MJS: I have been thinking a lot lately about translation, and how, in many ways, one of the currents that runs through this book, if quietly, is a meditation on the politics and meanings of translation. This idea resonates for me both as a literary scholar and as a creative writer. I began the project by thinking about how Black queer and feminist writers of the diaspora communicate ideas about difference and power in the formal properties of their texts. The choice to create a new, hybrid genre to talk about “fat, black, half-blind and ambidextrous” Black lesbian subjectivity, as Lorde puts it, or to invent new “shorthand” languages for talking about labor and desire in Botswana as [Bessie] Head does in her fiction—on a certain level, these are acts of translation, of re-articulating particular worldviews and social critique through poetic strategy. It’s a way of communicating to readers, viewers, and listeners a set of ideas about power that may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable through a medium (poetry, music, narrative) that is at least partly familiar.
“I began the project by thinking about how Black queer and feminist writers of the diaspora communicate ideas about difference and power in the formal properties of their texts.”
But on a more personal level, for me, this has also been an act of translation between disciplines and discourses. As a creative writer, my work absolutely takes up a poetics of difference. In my fiction, I am deeply drawn to idiosyncrasies of narrative voice. I love shifting point-of-view, even when you’re not supposed to, like in very short fiction. Even in my longer fiction, I often feel compelled to break form, to let my characters speak multiple languages, sometimes of their own devising, to let my narrators veer in and out of omniscience, to let the prose drop off and dip quickly into song. This is also the case for the writers I admire most. For me, as a fat Black queer woman writer in the U.S., these choices are often about conveying all the difference my characters experience. To get at the full swath and range of difference my characters experience in their lives—and the full weave of linked power structures they navigate—I have to tell the story in many different ways. So, the terms you mention are, on some level, a way of translating these craft choices into a language of literary theory, not because Black feminist artists’ creative choices need translation, but because scholarly discourse needs to include them more fully in the conversation.
ef: What do you see as the biggest takeaways from The Poetics of Difference?
Front cover image of The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora.
MJS: I would love to hear your answer to this! I guess I can say that what I hope readers will take away is a new attention to their own reading practices, particularly when it comes to texts by Black women and Black queer people. Part of what I’m arguing is that these Black queer and feminist texts ask us to read and re-read in multiple ways, to seek out their theoretical interventions and political critiques. The examples of Lorde’s “biomythography” and Shange’s “choreopoem” make that objective explicit on a certain level, announcing out the gate that a new reading practice will be necessary to make meaning from the text. This is also true for other Black queer and feminist texts throughout the diaspora, across time and space.
When we look at the fiction of Trinidadian-Canadian lesbian writer Dionne Brand, for example, her shifts in point-of-view offer us multiple perspectives not only on lesbian transnational belonging, but also on the complex shapes and textures of coming-of-age itself. When we see rappers like Cardi B and KC Ortiz troubling aesthetics of gender, sexuality and embodiment in their work, I hope that we understand their choices for the critiques that they are, and locate them within the literary lineages they’re carrying forward.
ef: In your introduction to Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974-1989, you describe reading writers’ letters as, “the best kind of eavesdropping. It brings the rush and sweetness of hidden listening…” How does the intimacy of being let in on secrets, of “things that were not meant for us,” inform how you approach the various archives that are centered in your work?
MJS: I love this question. I do feel that this project has brought me closer to many of the writers and artists I engage. And of course, reading in general is an intimate act—when we read, we are quite literally inviting another voice into our mind, often unsure where it will take us. And when we’re reading work we love, the intimacy deepens, because there’s a trust there, even—especially—when trust does not quite mean comfort.
“In a way, that’s what The Poetics of Difference is about—the importance of feeling and thinking as deeply as possible into black feminist writers’ voices, and intentionally contending with the multiple places those voices take us and the difficult learning that may reside there.”
In a way, that’s what The Poetics of Difference is about—the importance of feeling and thinking as deeply as possible into black feminist writers’ voices, and intentionally contending with the multiple places those voices take us and the difficult learning that may reside there. But from a methodological or process standpoint, yes, absolutely, I did feel aware of an intimacy with many of the texts. And because the book aims to chart a black queer feminist reading practice, I had to be attentive to my own reading and re-reading, to pinpoint as precisely as possible what formal choices create that sense of intimacy, when, and for whom, and when the comfort of intimacy gives way to a critical or pedagogical challenge, what Lorde calls “the intimacy of scrutiny,” which for her is how poetry creates thought and prompts political action.
ef: In the aforementioned introduction, you talk about how Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, “sit at opposite points of the kitchen table…around which your Black queer feminist literary politics take shape.” Could you share what you understand to be 3 core tenets of your Black queer feminist literary politics? And, alongside Parker and Lorde, what other artists, writers, thinkers, organizers, etc., do you see as crucial to the formulation of your Black queer feminist literary politics?
“My first point would be Love Black Women and Black Queer People Deeply.”
MJS: My first point would be Love Black Women and Black Queer People Deeply. It shouldn’t need to be said but it does. For many it’s easier said than done, because it means really interrogating the presences and legacies of racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism, fatphobia, and other power structures in our lives and worldviews, including the ways we view ourselves. The second would be an incitement to question actively and reject vociferously the structures of categorization and discipline that position feeling, pleasure, emotion, and the body as separate from and subordinate to knowledge, intellect, power, and value. That is, to recognize the body and the interior world as sites of knowledge and power. This also means recognizing the misogynoir (to use Moya Bailey’s term) and the heterosexism of logics that devalue Black feminist interior life, and fighting against those logics. The last point would be an imperative to learn and value multiple languages, to value expression, and to cultivate imagination as crucial means of creating our futures.
ef: What does a Black Woman Radical mean to you?
MJS: I hope “Black Woman Radical” means something different and deep-held to every person who claims the phrase. To me, I think it would mean being a Black woman fiercely committed to her own vision, as well as to the visions of other Black women and Black queer people co-creating futurity. It also means actively interrogating one’s own multiple, complex relationships to global power, and grappling with they ways in which we ourselves may function as “monsters,” as June Jordan puts it, in other Black women’s and Black queer people’s stories of oppression. It would be a verb, a practice of dreaming a vision of our futurity, working toward that vision in active defiance of the rhetorics of oppression that would silence us, and committing to doing so, in the words of Lil Kim, “no matter what people say.”
To purchase Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s new book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, please visit here.
For more information about Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, you can visit her website here.