sadé powell

Born in Baltimore and raised in every borough of New York City, sadé spent the last 7 years in Oakland as an organizer, leading and implementing community-based programs for BIPOC and queer youth in the Bay Area. She is a visual and concrete poet influenced by decolonial poetics and has self-published poems grappling with mysticism, fugitivity, love, thingliness, queerness, and grief. Her recent work is a series of typewriter poetry that is framed by subjective black study and imaginative experimentation on interobjectivity a proximity and relation to otherwise potentialities.  
 sadé holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology from San Francisco State University and an MA in Performance Studies at NYU Tisch.

Title of Project

wordtomydead//a rehearsal in (∞ - ∞) poethics and gesture towards the thing

Description of Project

wordtomydead // a rehearsal in (∞ - ∞) poethics and gesture towards ‘The Thing’ endeavors towards Da Silva’s invitation for a black feminist poethics, a trenchant undertaking of doing away with coloniality’s Human and World in favor of thingness- “a poethics of Blackness [that] would announce a whole range of possibilities for knowing, doing, and existing” and would “include the outline of a description of existence without the tools of universal reason” (Da Silva 2014). Honoring our call and response, I theorize with the plenum of black feminist scholars and performers of anticolonization, paving a performance path that traverses archival void for fugitive pilgrimages. My work considers the performative force of blackness’s creative capacity to signify otherwise, a refusal and “multiformalistic [im]possibility” (Brooks 2021). My poethic project is rooted in a (non)ethical reclamation of wayward sonic, kinesthetic, linguistic, and visual gestures. Through a writing practice and form of visual and concrete poetry called (but not limited to) typewriter art, I rehearse ways of destabilizing belied verisimilitudes of modernity’s Man: Word and Language including classificatory systems of writing and speech. My aim is to play with the fundamental feeling (and unintelligibility) of a black feminist knowing and doing- a mysticism that fleshes out beyond the bounds of materiality.

Project Inspiration

performance of everyday life, the commons, and black feminist poethics

Areas of Academic Interest

performative writing, black study, decolonial poetics, queer theory