“An Elegy of Place”: Affective Mapping in June Jordan’s Civil Wars

Abstract

Most people know June Jordan the poet, the activist, the political essayist, and perhaps even the fiction writer. Fewer perhaps know her as an architect, urban planner, Black ecofeminist, and spatial theorist. This essay uses Jordan’s theories of place as a framework for her autobiographical writing, turning primarily to Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), a compilation of essays, letters, lectures, scenarios, diary entries, and reportage. An interdisciplinary approach that incorporates Black feminist autobiography scholarship, trauma and affect theory, and queer theory uncovers Civil Wars as both an autobiography of feeling and an archive of intellectual development. Jordan’s theory of place in Civil Wars functions as an architectural aesthetic that facilitates affective mapping—the movement of feeling between the self and the collective. Affective mapping allows Jordan to narrate a relational self by drawing on Black feelings that emerge within the intimacy of place and in the frequencies of Black sound.