“CONTEMPORARY BLACK WOMEN’S FICTION: Transmodern Ethics and Poetics of Crisis and Limits”

This study explores contemporary narratives of the limit revolving around different forms of crisis faced by Black women and queers especially in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. Their voice has gained more visibility in such contemporary narratives as Nicole Dennis Benn’s Patsy (2019); Britt Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020); Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom (2020); Nnedi Okarafor’s Who Fears Death (2010); Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees (2015); Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013); Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017); and Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2020). These narratives present the evident and/or subtle systematic exclusions faced by Black women and queers at different levels; they are treated as if they were ungrievable lives and irrelevant beings by the upholders of power. By analyzing a wide range of narratives that have received wide critical acclaim as well as those that have passed unnoticed, this study explores the variety of Black women’s and queers’ states and responses when faced with a crisis.