May Ayim and Diasporic Poetics

Abstract

This article explores conceptual affinities between the poetic aesthetic of May Ayim, a co-founder of the Afro-German movement and a premier Black German poetic voice, and the anticolonial and postcolonial poetic agenda of the Afro-French experimental movement known as Négritude. In constructing this relationship between Afro-German and Afro-French cultural production, the article seeks to complicate previous critical assessments that have linked Afro-German and African American paradigms for asserting cultural identities and urges readers to consider more wide-ranging comparisons that focus on the intersectionality of poetic diasporas.