The Evidence of Things Unseen: Experimental Form as Black Feminist Praxis

Abstract

Few have read the novel central to this investigation of black women’s experimental writing. The imperative to feature this novel is motivated by the absence of black women’s creative and critical contributions to most conversations about experimental literatures, the avant-garde, and about the ways in which black women’s narrative innovations disrupt and challenge linear formulations of knowledge and history that shape the very notion of black humanity and black existence. Carlene Hatcher Polite’s novel Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play (1975) tells the story of Arista Prolo—Sister X—an African American woman, who, the novel’s narrator explains, is deceased and mostly unknown and unremembered: