The work of the Scots-Ghanaian poet, writer, artist and activist Maud Sulter (1960–2008) embodied many of the characteristics of what is now often referred to as ‘art writing’ or experimental writing within the fields of visual art, art history and feminist activism. Her poetry, plays, essays, statements, manifestoes and monologues often appeared ‘out of place’, explicitly challenging the conventions of the publications and sites in which they appeared, and, writing mainly in English, in England, she incorporated untranslated Scots, Glaswegian dialect and French into both her poetry and image-text artworks. Frequently citing other Black and lesbian women writers (Audre Lorde, Dorothea Smartt, Gertrude Stein, Angelina Weld Grimke) throughout her work, and often writing in collaboration with other Black women, Sulter used writing and visual art to perform her politics in a constant endeavour to ‘put black women back in the centre of the frame’.

A working-class, Black lesbian from the Gorbals in Glasgow, Sulter’s experimental, multi-modal, anti-canonical writing frequently challenged the boundaries between different areas of enquiry, focussing on issues around race, class, sexuality and gender. In 1988’s Call and Response she subverted the conventions of academic writing, adopting a highly personal, manifesto-like register in her demand for the visibility and acknowledgement of ‘Blackwomen's representation and position in a white heterosexist male-dominated world’. In 1989’s Zabat Narratives, she created object biographies for her black foremothers, allowing reimagined archetypes to speak for themselves while returning agency to the silent, passive figure of the Muse. Her 1991’s multi-media installation Hysteria, loosely based on the life of African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, prefigured the use of historical speculative narrative in contemporary art, while her 2002 play Service to Empire represented an innovative recasting of her own biography through a fictionalised account of the life of Ghanaian leader Jerry J Rawlings.

In spite of her extensive work as a poet — she was winner of the Vera Bell Prize for Poetry in 1985 — and her prolific work as a writer and publisher across form and medium for over two decades, Sulter’s legacy is often discussed only in relation to her work as a visual artist. This paper seeks to examine the mode and style of Sulter’s poetic, dramatic and narrative writing as key examples of cross-genre and auto-theoretical feminist, queer and postcolonial practices which prefigure the emergence of these approaches in contemporary experimental writing today.