This is a study of Black women’s anger, its attempted silencing, and its cultural effects. It explores how the messiness of anger and rage is navigated and represented in literary texts, but also commended and valued as part of Black feminist lived experience.
Anne Potjans has been a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Consolidator grant project "Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives" at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin since October 2022 and currently works on a postdoctoral project tentatively entitled "Night Shift – Queer Subcultural Spaces and the Black Diasporic Experience." Earlier in 2022, she completed her dissertation "‘Why Are You So Angry?’" – The Uses of Rage and Anger in Black Feminist Literature." From 2015 to 2022, Anne Potjans has been a lecturer at the American Studies program at Humboldt, where she has taught a variety of classes in North-American Literature and culture. In 2019 she took part in a faculty exchange with the HONORS program at the University of Washington, where she taught a class on Black German and African American cultural and political connections. She is a joint winner of Peter Lang’s Emerging Scholars Competition "New Perspectives in Black Studies."