How Three Black Women Writers Combined Spiritual and Sensual Love: Rhetorically Transcending the Boundaries of Language (Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Dionne Brand)

This is a study of women writers of the African Diaspora and their articulation of the erotic as an important aspect of human experience beyond the limits and expectations of society. Within the imaginary scope of the works of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Dionne Brand, the erotic is made manifest through rewriting narrative and poetic form. Chapter One of this title considers the task of circumventing the racism and misogyny in the building of narratives that would empower women of the African Diaspora and would articulate Black women with their humanity and erotic selfhoods intact. Chapter Two discusses how in Zami Audre Lorde's reinvention of the narrative reflects her understanding of language as a source of erotic power where one converts one's status from invisible to visible. Chapter Three discusses how Toni Morrison in Jazz reworks traditional narrative structure in order to build her vision of black existence and the erotic. Chapter Four explores how Brand dismantles the notion of a fixed definition of form and subverts literary structures in order to imagine pleasure through unfamiliar arrangements of language in the novel "At the Full and Change of the Moon". Chapter Five discusses how the erotic is a disruption of expectations of sameness and totality.