Marita Bonner’s Aesthetics of Discrimination

This article situates the short stories of Marita Bonner in the context of Black women’s modernist techniques and Black feminist geography. Bonner’s work emphasizes the aesthetic basis of racial ideologies, and a formalist reading highlights how her stories’ fictional Frye Street setting, sentence-level mechanics, and multipart structures call attention to and destabilize the normative perceptions that produce and reinforce both gender roles and structures of antiblackness.