For Colored Boys Who Are Committing Suicide /

When The Rainbow Is Never Enuf

Looking to trouble the widely celebrated works of the civil rights era (Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr.), Black nationalist project(s) (Abiodun Oyewole), Jazz poetry (Duke Ellington), and
mainstream Black media/popular culture (Tyler Perry), The 1AC (re)reads the work of Ntozake
Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf as a
primary text. This practice redefines definitions of life and death through physician-assisted
suicide. By drawing on the work of poet teachers, the 1AC moves in a critical posture toward new
valuations and representations of Blackness, queerness, and futurity.
Notes.
1. Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is
Enuf, 1975 (New York: Macmillan 1989), 3.
2. Ibid. at, 3-4.
3. Ibid. at, 4.
4. Ibid. at, 5.
5. Telia U. Anderson, Calling on the Spirit The Performativity of Black Womens Faith in the
Baptist Church Spiritual Traditions and Its Radical Possibilities for Resistance, African American
Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader (Oxford University Press: 2001): 120-121.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black
Feminism 1968-1996, (Duke University: Diss 2010): 18.
9. Shange., at, 4.
10. Audre Lorde, Litany for Survival.
11. Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have A Dream Speech, 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial,
Washington D.C.
12. Alysia Harris & Jasmine Mans, Black and Blue, The Strivers Row, Selected Poems From
The Deans List Showcase And The Classics, 2013.
13. Ibid.
14. Shange., at, 55.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Hortense J. Spillers, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, Diacritics,
Vol. 17, No. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The "American" Connection (Summer, 1987): 65.
20. Shange., at, 58.
21. bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York & London: Routledge, 2004):
3.
22. Shange., at, 58.
23. Melissa Harris-Perry & bell hooks, "Melissa Harris-Perry And bell hooks Discuss Black
Womanhood, Politics And Media," Black Voices, The Huffington Post, 8 Nov. 2013. TS.

24. James Baldwin & Audre Lorde, Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin
and Audre Lorde, Essence Magazine Vol. 13 No. 8, December 1984, 74., See Gumbs., at, 400,
and Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice, New York: Random House, 1968, 122-137.
25. Ibid., at, 401.
26. Shange., at, 56.
27. Ibid., at, 59-60.
28. Ibid., at, 60.
29. Audre Lorde, Poet as Teacher-Human as Poet-Teacher as Human, in I Am Your Sister:
Collected and Unpublished Writings by Audre Lorde, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Johnetta Bestch
Cole and Rudolph P. Byrd, (New York: Oxford Press, 2009).
30. Audre Lorde, Power, 1976.
31. Shange., at, 14.
32. Ibid. at, 13.