In the kitchen, cooking up diaspora possibilities: Bailey and Lewis's Sistahs

This article analyses Maxine Bailey and Sharon M. Lewis's play Sistahs (1994) as an instance of African diaspora feminism in the Americas. The drama's focus on five women in a Canadian kitchen displaces the hegemony enjoyed by African Americans as signifiers of blacknesss, challenging spectators as well as readers to remember instead the long history of blacks in Canada and the existence of multiple African diasporas in the Americas. Further, its rewriting of a 1970s cultural feminism dramatizes the labour of fostering an African diasporic sensibility and subverts that paradigm's conventional emphasis on heteronormativity.