“Of coarse dark textures": Language and Identity Politics in Harryette Mullen's S*PeRM**K*T"

This essay discusses the way in which African American poet Harryette Mullen bridges the supposed gap between ethnic literature and formally innovative poetry. Reading S*PeRM**K*T (1992), it shows Mullen’s Language poetics at work in the redefinition of blackness through a dissemination of multiple meanings that resist the commodification of the body – black and white, social and linguistic – in US capitalistic consumer culture and society.