The African Diaspora as a Cosmopolitan Experience in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove and Elizabeth Alexander

This paper explores how the African diaspora, whether voluntary or involuntary, is presented as a unique cosmopolitan experience transcending not only the geographical boundaries, but also the barriers of time, language, race, culture and genre in an attempt to connect the people of African descent and Africa on the one hand, with the Western world of Americas, Europe and the whole world on the other hand. The paper focuses on explicating such an issue in the poetry of three African American women poets— Nikki Giovanni, Rita Dove and Elizabeth Alexander. Following a comparative approach, the paper explores how the poems of the three poets depict the African diaspora and the experience of the African American as a diasporic subject within cosmopolitan contexts that create multi-spatiotemporal, multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-generic realms. Such a process of traversing helps to re-read and re-vision the African diaspora as part and parcel of the world human experience which connects the past, present and future of the Black people with other peoples all over world.