Search Results

This chapter analyses works by Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga, which interrogate the moralism that infuses those aspects of social movements that become invested in respectability and legibility. Since neoliberal disavowal of gendered, sexual, and racialized precarity is so centrally predicated on respectability as the only avenue to security, a refusal of respectability is a powerful repudiation of neoliberal modes of power. This chapter posits Lorde and Moraga as paradigmatic of woman of color feminist / queer of color theories of the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s, which it argues is marked by the exacerbated extraction of surplus value from populations, modes of surplus value based not only on the economic but also the affective. It examines several essays from Sister Outsider to highlight that an economy dependent on devalued people uses affects like terror and loathing to create them. This chapter connects Lorde’s politics of affect with Moraga’s refusal to be morally defensible on any terms as a means of critiquing respectability and legibility. It explores two of Moraga’s texts—The Last Generation, a collection of poetry and prose, and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood—for how they engage with generationality and reproduction.

This chapter interprets Audre Lorde’s experience of cancer and racial injury through psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories of sadistic aggression, mourning, and psychic reparation. Drawing on Klein’s theories of the maternal breast as the first part-object, the original lost object that initiates a cycle of destruction and reparation, the chapter considers the psychic consequences of losing the breast through the traumatic processes of weaning and invasive carcinoma. For Lorde, illness, racism, sexism, and homophobia are conjoined as objectifying forces. The chapter inquires into how psychoanalytic object relations theory contends with objectification—becoming the object of a fatal disease, racial hatred, or sexist assault. Indicating how destruction can play a part in reparation, Lorde described her own mastectomy as breaking off a piece of herself to make her whole. She rejects the breast prosthesis on the grounds that it enforces objectifying gender norms. Lorde’s critique of the “prosthetic pretense” is applied to contemporary breast cancer culture. The chapter proposes that one of the unconscious motivations behind the social pressure to reconstruct the breast stems from a fetishism of the first object.

This chapter argues that Audre Lorde's essays and poetry from the 1980s develop an overlooked yet significant strand of second-wave Black feminism that reveals continuities with postwar anticolonial internationalism. Lorde's poetry and prose from the mid-1980s on, after the invasion of Grenada, reveal that independent Black nationhood becomes an important political goal for her, one not yet superseded by “free” mobility or exilic diasporic communities. Moreover, it is in Lorde's post-invasion prose and poetry that she most explicitly and consistently explores a nationalist internationalism, positing that African Americans are morally and politically bound to support Third World and indigenous struggles for national sovereignty and that anticolonial struggles illuminate and impact African Americans' situation in the United States as an oppressed people.

This chapter considers what it means to be nobody in a university economy designed to produce somebody individuated, assimilated, and consenting to empire. It examines the complexity of the administrative function of teaching writing in an early black studies/women’s studies context through two pieces of creative poetic and nonfiction writing by June Jordan and Audre Lorde on their own teaching in the public university system from the late 1960s through to the 1980s. Jordan creates a mutilayered pedagogical narrative on the intergenerational dispersal of love between her own generation and the generation of her students in a police state. In Disciplinary Matters, intellectual historian Nick Mitchell distinguishes between the administrative and intellectual functions of black studies as a disciplinary form.

The Introduction begins by looking at the meaning of the word “difference” in relation to Audre Lorde’s essay called “Learning from the 60s,” which demanded that everyone regardless of their race take into account their own complicities with power over and against others. In this book “difference” references a cultural and epistemological practice that holds in suspension (without requiring resolution) contradictory, mutually exclusive, and negating impulses. “Difference” names an epistemological position, ontological condition, and political strategy that reckon with the shift in the technologies of power that one might as well call “neoliberal.” The Introduction goes on to look at how the term “neoliberal” has been used historically and how it is used in this book. It defines neoliberalism foremost as an epistemological structure of disavowal, a means of claiming that racial and gendered violence are things of the past. It does so by affirming certain modes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized life, particularly through invitation into reproductive respectability, so as to disavow its exacerbated production of premature death. The introduction concludes by explaining that the author takes inspiration from Lorde and bends toward the project of pursuing a complex liberation without any guarantee of a certain or knowable future.

This chapter discusses Bob Flanagan’s sadomasochistic plays; Audre Lorde’s reflections on cancer; as well as Gilles Deleuze’s theorizations of illness and masochism, to study the notion of desubjectification. Flanagan’s plays shows how people cope with powerlessness that comes from within—when pain comes from the body because of illness. Deleuze imagines masochism as a step away from the discipline of modernity and subjectivity; hence, it allows for the opening of new possibilities for thought and life. The most developed form of this argument comes from his work with Félix Guattari on the Body without Organs (BwO). Lastly, Lorde’s reading of the erotic discusses communal self, scripting agency, and sexuality as affects of the plurality of subjectification.

By attending conferences, workshops, and symposia in London, New York, Minnesota, and Accra, May Ayim, an Afro-German writer and activist, engaged in political activism internationally. Through these events, Ayim confronted diverse forms of inequality. Yet she also cultivated strong activist ties in Germany. With the support of Afro-Caribbean feminist and writer Audre Lorde, Ayim helped to usher in the Afro-German movement of the 1980s and 1990s. She also cofounded the organization the Initiative of Black Germans (Initiative Schwarze Deutsche, ISD). Motivated by her diasporic politics and international connections, Ayim employed her literary work as a form of activism to obtain social visibility and equality for herself, Afro-Germans, and other people of color. This essay provides one of the first sustained accounts on Ayim’s global activism.

The Caribbean American writers examined in chapter three, Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, seek a spiritual home in the Caribbean, the home of their parents and ancestors. More specifically, they write and thereby claim multiple homes in transnational spaces through the Caribbean and an African diasporic identity. Both Marshall and Lorde directly challenge neocolonial discourse and tourism by creating alternative Black female travel narratives that represent diasporic travel, identity, and multiple homespaces. They both introduce new forms of tourism and possibilities for resistance to neocolonialism, while uncovering the strong continuities between the racial, sexual, and gender dynamics of colonialism (and slavery) and neocolonialism (and tourism).

Audre Lorde understood giving isolated conceptual attention to sexual difference to be a tool of social control. I first discuss this claim in the context of Lorde’s philosophy of difference. I argue that Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and All Men Are Mortal offer in the figure of ambiguity a philosophy of difference that anticipates important aspects of that of Lorde: in these Beauvoirian texts ambiguity articulates an approach which is simultaneously ecological and political. However, to find this thread in Beauvoir’s oeuvre, it is necessary to read against images that she uses in both books to index ambiguity: Marianne de Sinclair (in All Men are Mortal) and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse (in The Ethics of Ambiguity). These images suggest the conceptual reduction of difference to sexual difference that Lorde warns against. I argue that Beauvoirian ambiguity has a power that can override the two figures that she uses to represent it.

This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the technocentric world. It includes Édouard Glissant who offers an optimistic promise of literature's power to break systems, writing poetry that can “thicken” the “machine that the world is.” Audre Lorde is more skeptical, opening the possibility that even literature may be one among the “master's tools” that are inapposite to the task of dismantling. Joanna Russ is more skeptical still, in her insistence that scholars and science-fiction writers should “give up talking about technology” and W.S. Merwin imagines an intelligent machine that is fated to be relinquished. Such literary and theoretical practices do not oppose technology as such, but instead oppose large-scale forms of exploitation by dismantling the machines at their disposal. The chapter also talks about Epistemological Luddism, a specific form of Luddism that provides a critical defense against late-twentieth century technological politics and a dedramatization of the false choice for or against technology.

This chapter stages a conversation between the work of two British photographers who have explored breast cancer, Jo Spence and Sam Taylor-Wood, and the responses to mastectomy and prosthesis/breast reconstruction of two American feminist critics/activists, Audre Lorde and Diane Price Herndl. The analysis particularly focuses on photographs from Spence’s touring exhibition The Picture of Health? (1985) and Taylor-Wood’s ‘Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit with Hare’ (2001). Reading the photographs in the context of Herndl’s response to Lorde and in relation to other breast cancer representations, the chapter shows how despite their (national and generic) differences, these narratives mark important stages in the representation of breast cancer and of the post-operative body during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Discussing the tension between visible self/image and voice/caption in the texts and photographs the chapter addresses: the relation between visibility and concealment in representations of the scarred body; the (de)politicisation of patienthood; feminist responses to breast cancer culture; and the conditions under which photography can successfully usurp the power of the medical gaze to re-imagine or re-cover bodies.

This coda provides a meditation on the brown and black mother and her role in producing brown jouissance. Rather than a working through of any particular work of art, the discussion here involves a theoretical meditation on her estrangement from the familial. While this distention might result in mourning, we might also locate non-Oedipal possibilities for relationality that center a queer (and black and brown) femininity. This chapter orients that conversation around Audre Lorde’s Zami and her discussion of the mother in relation to geography and her own identity as a black lesbian.

This chapter considers the outcomes of some interactions among black South African and African American writers discussed in preceding chapters, but “updated” here in the context of the 1980s. It explores how earlier transnational engagements led to a series of subsequent texts and interpersonal relationships as the global antiapartheid movement began to reach its apex. Those works—by Richard Rive, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks—attest to the impress of earlier writers (Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Bessie Head) and, by returning us to the matter of cultural influence, point to the considerable role South Africa and its writers played in shaping African American writerly imaginations. Furthermore, it is argued that Cliff's poem “Constructive Engagement” plays with the name of the Reagan-era U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa to powerful effect.

This chapter examines how African activists apply the notion of African diaspora within their European minority community. The studies of African diaspora are vital in order to strengthen the African diasporic subjectivity. This subjectivity is then used to impose the significance of the African identity to the marginalization of their communities in Europe. In addition, this African diasporic subjectivity is initially attributable to men only; however, theorists argue that the question in race does not cover questions in gender and sexuality; from there evolved diasporic intersubjectivity. Diasporic intersubjectivity became evident when African feminist poets Gwendolyn Rodgers and Audre Lorde pioneered the liberation movements of 1970 through poetry. This chapter explores the transnational community of Europe segregating the population of the African minority, through the use of intersubjective models of diaspora identity.

This chapter departs from an exclusive focus on structure, whether it be that of the double-helix or scaled up to the symbolic order, I argue that black female sex(uality) and reproduction are better understood via a framework of emergence and within the context of iterative, intra-active multiscalar systems—biological, psychological, environmental, and cultural. Crucially, Wangechi Mutu’s Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors and Audre Lorde’s TheCancer Journals reveal the stakes of this intra-activity as it pertains to the semio-material history of “the black female body,” reproductive function, and sex(uality) as linchpin and opposable limit of “the human” in scientific taxonomies and medical science, particularly that of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae and Ernst Haeckel’s highly aesthetic approach to evolutionary theory. Mutu’s art is notable for its constructive reorientation of the theorization of race via a reflexive methodological practice of collage, one that reframes the spectatorial encounter from that of a determinate Kantian linear teleological drama of subjects and objects to that of intra-active processes and indeterminate feedback loops. Thus, this is not a study of a reified object but of an intra-actional field that includes material objects but is not limited to them.

This chapter delves more deeply into the matter of the black vulva in arguing for a revaluation of narcissism, friction, and superficiality by dwelling on Mickalene Thomas’s use of rhinestones as excessive decorations in The Origin of the Universe (2012). A reimagining of Gustave Courbet’s infamous headless, nude portrait of a woman, Origin of the World (1866), Thomas’s work positions rhinestone-embellished genitals in the center of the frame. This chapter argues that Thomas’s painting offers a meditation on Audre Lorde’s matrilineal womanism while also allowing us to think with the idea of surface within the medium of painting. Both this calling forth of 1970s- 1980s black lesbian feminism and the textures of the surface bring forth friction as a form of relationality and narcissism as a necessary form of self-creation. Brown jouissance, this chapter argues, inheres in the excesses of surface that the painting presents.

This chapter analyzes Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) as a performance of witnessing in which Weems restores voice to the archive of portraits that she reprints. While Weems’s installation has been read as trafficking in woundedness, this chapter argues that thinking photography as a technology of reproduction allows us to see Weems’s work as enlarging concepts of diaspora and mothering while also insisting on the opacity of interiority. This chapter positions this form of the maternal in conversation with Audre Lorde’s expansive concept of diaspora. Here, the concept of brown jouissance allows us to reimagine the work that is going on in this piece of art. It enables us to theorize witnessing and photography as fleshy enactments of spiritual resistance and to re-imagine possibilities of black gendering.

Writing the erotic is what Morrison has been risking throughout her output since Sula (1973) through Beloved (1986), Jazz (1992), down to A Mercy (2008). The erotic is not a theme, but part and parcel of what writing ventures. Incest, pedophilia, rape, pornography, gang bangs — in Lorde’s words: “abuse of feeling” — and the constant probing of “love” — the title of Morrison’s eighth novel — go hand in hand with a reclaiming of the erotic, constitutive of the black subject (in writing), crucial to its survival and correlative to its freedom. Where Lorde offers a manifesto for a women-identified politics of the erotic, Morrison's fiction risks a poetics of the erotic against (and with) violence and trauma. How does her text summon up sensuality in relation to sexual difference and historical violence? How does it write “black” desire? Is there a progression throughout her oeuvre? If Jazz sets up an erotics of reading in keeping with Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, the “lustre of poetry” must always be contained by the space(s) left for the other, encompassed by the sublimity of “word-work” that fights the death of language (Nobel Lecture, 1993).

This chapter argues that the once-robust black natural law tradition declined at the end of the civil rights movement, and it speculates about reasons for this decline. The chapter tracks three intellectual currents that pull away from the black natural law tradition while embracing fragments of that tradition. The first current, including James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, focuses exclusively on the emotional aspect of the black natural law tradition. The second current, including Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, and Benjamin Carson, focuses exclusively on the rational aspect. The third current, including Barack Obama, uses parts of the black natural law tradition to advance pragmatic political ends.