Poetry, writes Audre Lorde, “is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” A self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, poet, warrior,” Lorde produced a genre-spanning body of work that defied “mythical norm” of white heteropatriarchal American literature, and helped to nourish the vital emergence of Black feminism in the United States and abroad. Lorde’s personal and political alliances with non-Black lesbians, non-lesbian women, non-American women of color, and non-white men fuel both her theorization of difference as the key creative force for community-building, as well as her critical interventions in the women’s movement and Black liberation movement. How did Lorde’s commanding presence, famed sensuality, and poetic brilliance shape the contours of contemporary feminisms?
This course will introduce students to key texts spanning Audre Lorde’s poetry, prose, and fiction, including key essays and speeches from Sister Outsider, excerpts from her “biomythograpy” Zami, and poems from her collected works. Along the way, we will focus on her philosophical explorations of embodiment, mortality, and the “uses of the erotic.” We will ask how her lived experience as a disabled child, a pregnant person, a lesbian woman, and a cancer survivor informed her literary and philosophical project, and consider what it might mean to take seriously the view that poetry is “not a luxury” and survival “not an academic skill.” In addition to works by Lorde, we will also read selections from Adrienne Rich, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Alexis De Veaux, Cheryl Clarke, and Gloria I. Joseph.
