And Where that Language Does Not Yet Exist

Abstract This essay-review is centered on two recently published contemporary works about language, literature, embodiment, and ritual: Ana-Maurine Lara’s Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (2020) and Mecca Jamila Sullivan’s The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Poetics in the African Diaspora (2021). Exploring creative and critical praxis as method and object of study, both authors provide innovative studies of queerness and queer worldmaking in the work of African diasporic spiritual and artistic communities.Lara’s and Sullivan’s arguments seem most relevant and timely for what twenty-first–century Black theorizing must do: refuse US exceptionalism, solidify transnational solidarities/relations across the African Diaspora, . . . better prepare for the abolition of gender.