Paradigms of American Literature: Black Feminist Poetry - Detailseite

In her essay „Poetry is not a Luxury“ Audre Lorde describes the significance of poetic writing within the discourse of Black Feminism as the “revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight” (Sister Outsider, p.37). This quote gives direction to the aim of this class in two ways: for one, Lorde points out that for Black women poetic writing is not just a mere artistic form of expression but also a platform to explore and share their realities. For another, she hints at limitations posed by generic conventions that — derived from a Western literary tradition — render poetic writing a highly stylized literary art form to such an extent that it threatens to sever the link between poetic expression and the writer’s lived reality. In this class, we will therefore not only look at the specific aesthetics and literary merit of poetry written by Black Feminist writers, but we will also explore these texts’ political scope and activist endeavor in the specific context of their time. We will explore how Black Feminist poets make use of generic conventions and boundaries as they challenge, expand, and transgress them and work towards possibilities to communicate their multi-faceted life realities at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and beyond. While the focus of this seminar is on texts written in the late 20^th century and 21^st century (e.g. Wanda Coleman, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, and Venus Selenite), we will also engage with texts from different eras and look at different modes of poetic performance.

The course will be designed as a hybrid online-course using Moodle, which means that there will be a mix of synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Students registered in this class are asked to make sure that they are generally available during the time of the sessions. More detailed information will be sent out to registered students in the beginning of term.