17th Floor: A pedagogical oracle from/with Audre Lorde

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1974, warrior poet mother Audre Lorde published the poem “Blackstudies,” a freeform dream villanelle about her complicated experience as a Black lesbian feminist English professor at the City University of New York during the dynamic period when students rose up in protest. The university granted open admissions, and cultural nationalists who taught at City University worked to create a Black Studies program. In the poem, she describes her vantage point at this particular historical and pedagogical moment from the seventeenth floor within a dreamscape where she navigates the stereotypes, silences, and urgencies that shaped her experience as an educator. 17th Floor is a poetic oracle that contextualizes the ongoing work of “Blackstudies” (the poem and the practice), and for this reason, it should be activated as a resource for current Black and Brown lesbian educators and everyone who brings complexity and nuance to their teaching settings, their students, each other, and the world more broadly.