May Ayim and Subversive Laughter: The Aesthetics of Epistemic Change

Ayim is seldom read for her gift for making people laugh. Here, I assess the use of humor and irony in her poetry and performances. Following Audre Lorde's reasoning that poetry is not a luxury, I suggest that Ayim's aesthetics make racism visible and lay the foundations for epistemic change. In performing poetry that she deliberately made accessible, not least through humor, Ayim occupied discursive space, offering audiences and readers comic pleasure at the price of acknowledging the alternative knowledge her poetry produced. I therefore read her poetic humor as an act of aesthetic insurrection that both produces new knowledge and invites epistemic change.