Danica Savonick, Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College

In Open Admissions Danica Savonick traces the largely untold story of the teaching experience of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich at the City University of New York (cuny) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This period, during which cuny guaranteed tuition-free admission to every city high school graduate, was one of the most controversial in US educational history. Analyzing their archival teaching materials—syllabi, lesson plans, and assignments—alongside their published work, Savonick reveals how these renowned writers were also transformative educators who developed creative methods of teaching their students to navigate and change the world. In fact, many of their methods—such as student-led courses, collaborative public projects, and the publication of student writing—anticipated the kinds of student-centered and antiracist pedagogies that have become popular in recent years. In addition to recovering the pedagogical legacy of these writers, Savonick shows how teaching in cuny’s free and open classrooms fundamentally altered their writing and, with it, the course of American literature and feminist criticism.

Danica Savonick. <i>Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College</i> Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 250 pp.

by Danica Savonick Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. 264 pp. $27.95 (paper), $18.99 (e-book). One account of open admissions at the City University of New York (CUNY) might simply deliver the core facts: it was an enrollment policy guaranteeing tuition-free admission to all New York City

The introduction explains the historical moment in which Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich were teaching. It provides background information on the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) educational opportunity program and CUNY’s open admissions policy. It also describes the book’s methodology, which combines a feminist approach to archival research with literary analysis. Situating their teaching within longer histories of social justice pedagogies (including traditions of Progressive, radical, Black liberatory, and Black feminist pedagogies, Freedom Schools, Black studies, and women’s studies), the introduction posits that these writers were theorists and practitioners of student-centered and feminist pedagogy. It also highlights two major patterns in their teaching: they redistributed classroom power to students and facilitated student knowledge production (especially through the publication of student writing). Finally, the introduction illustrates how teaching at CUNY shaped their writing and twentieth-century US literature more broadly. These classrooms gave rise to new literary forms, “the genres of open admissions”—the classroom lyric, the campus essay, and the anthology of student writing—and many insights associated with intersectional feminism.

This article explores the pedagogical foundations of three U.S. Black women writers—Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde—widely recognized as among the most influential and prolific writers of 20th century cultures of emancipation. Their distinct yet entwined legacies—as socialist feminists, people’s poets and novelists, community organizers, and innovative educators—altered the landscapes of multiple liberation movements from the late 1960s to the present, and offer a striking example of the possibilities of radical women’s intellectual friendships. The internationalist reverberations of Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde are alive and ubiquitous, even if to some readers today in the Caribbean and Latin America, their names may be unfamiliar.[Bambara’s fiction centered Black and Third World women and children absorbing vibrant life lessons within societies structured to harm them. Her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, posed the question - “are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” -to conjoin healing and resistance for a new embattled generation under President Reagan’s neoliberal shock doctrines that were felt worldwide. June Jordan’s salvos of essays, fiction, and poetry -including Things That I Do in the Dark, On Call, and Affirmative Acts - intervened in struggles around Black English, community control, police violence, sexual assault, and youth empowerment. Audre Lorde’s words are suffused across U.S. movements (and, increasingly, in the Caribbean and Latin America)- on signs, shirts, and memes, at #BlackLivesMatter and International Women’s Strike marches. Your silence will not protect you. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Revolution is not a one-time event. However, her voluminous legacy may risk becoming a series of slogans, “the Audre Lorde that reads like a bumper sticker.”

Reviewed by: The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division G. Douglas Atkins The American Protest Essay and National Belonging: Addressing Division. By Brian Norman. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2007. Brian Norman has produced a well-documented, thick (if short) book that could have been much better with greater care to particulars. The problem bedevils those committed [End Page 162] to and driven by theory and agendas alike—precisely including the “protest” writers rather lavishly studied here. Norman deserves commendation for directing attention to the essay and, in particular, “the American protest essay,” which he painstakingly traces through Helen Hunt Jackson, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, and June Jordan. Explicitly concerned to “cleave” or “tether”—two of his favorite terms—the political and the literary, Norman offers sometimes suggestive readings short on literary analysis and discussion of form and long on ideas. He comes close, a number of times, however, to the critical recognition that access to ideas derives from form. He is well aware that tension resides at the heart of the essay as form—a protean and productive both/and, in other words. Norman sometimes speaks of a “double consciousness” operating in Du Bois and Baldwin, but he fails to link it with the essayistic capaciousness that Baldwin describes at the end of “Notes of a Native Son”—and that echoes important remarks by Eliot and by Fitzgerald: “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition.” Such particulars, which not only enrich texture but fuel needed comparative analysis, are too often lacking in Norman’s book. Norman describes his book as “an opening foray to understand how and why politically engaged literary figures turn to the essay in order to challenge and . . . ‘re-vise’ stories of national belonging” (157). A certain—and laudable—modesty attends the effort, which is nevertheless executed with thoroughness (and massive documentation). For its faults, this book succeeds in tracing the texts in which “writers bring the experiences of those lacking full social status into the public arena by directly addressing a divided audience, documenting with journalistic fervor representative instances of injustice, and citing state promises of full social participation for all” (1). Unfortunately, Norman does not always well distinguish essays from sermons, manifestos, and other related, though discernibly different, forms, a failure that considerably diminishes the achievement. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge Brian Norman’s many and gracious remarks on my own work on the essay. That my commentary has been helpful, stirring thought and suggesting directions, is most gratifying. Sometimes, unfortunately, Norman appropriates ideas without having fully considered them in context; consideration, in any case, of my notion of the essay as site, rather than genre, might have been useful (I expand the point in my new Reading Essays: An Invitation). Lamentably, his book, while welcome, lacks careful proofreading and editing (I, for instance, find myself time after time listed as “Douglass”; the idea of the essay as “second-class citizen” derives from E.B. White, not me; the writer John McPhee is misidentified as James; and awkwardness of expression abounds). G. Douglas Atkins University of Kansas Copyright © 2009 Mid-America American Studies Association

Tillsammans Means Overlapping Edges, as in Tiles or Scales: Feeling Translation Jennifer Hayashida (bio) But there’s a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. I’m afraid of it all slipping away into: “Ah, yes, I understand you.” —Audre Lorde, “Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich: An Interview with Audre Lorde”1 I started writing in my sophomore year after reading the poet Adrienne Rich and thinking: this is almost right but does not quite say what I want to say . . . —Claudia Rankine2 1 “We were hoping for an essay about Claudia Rankine’s work and tentatively about Citizen. We would love if you would write for ________ regarding this.” For, or together with, a selection from the Swedish edition of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. [End Page 215] A kind of transnational solidarity work, repeated attempts by the editors and I to compare our analyses regarding language, race, and migration, a joint poetics of here and there. It is always a different thing to consider the afterlife of the translated text, how it is read—by whose bodies and for whom? I consider the racialized body an instrument in the work of translation, a potential decolonial saboteur. The translator can be an (un)settler. The translator can be a settler. This is a translation from the Swedish, my translation of a failure, a recycling of the disaster.3 [End Page 216] 2 Racism and xenophobia. Apart and Together. In Sweden—here—the latter is seen as part and parcel of the former. Any distinctions made between the two may be perceived as undermining the political claims of both. Acknowledge the situational imbrication of the two terms. Try to explain how they are weaponized as both together and apart in U.S. antiblack and yellow peril discourse. Use 1996, Bill Clinton’s second term, to illustrate overlapping edges, as in tiles or scales: The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act The strategic deployment of overlapping edges against nonwhite bodies within U.S. logics of empire and racial capitalism. “An Dilemma: The Problem and Democracy was, Mr. Myrdal once said, ‘not a study of the but of the American from the viewpoint of the most disadvantaged group.’”4 Swedish concern about the “American dilemma” while Sweden still operated the State Institute for Racial Biology (1922–1958), brainchild of the Swedish Society for Eugenics. [End Page 217] 3 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Nina Mangalanayagam, “Balancing Act,” 2012. Black-and-white still image taken from ten-minute split-screen HD video installation. Translation is the method by which I gather the data of my embodiment.5 Attempt to translate Black Lives Matter into Swedish: a. It’s about Black Lives b. Black Lives Are Important c. Black Lives Affect A BLM solidarity video produced by the political party Feministiskt Initiativ (FI!) transforms the rallying cry into a solemn Black . . . Lives . . . Matter, the protracted enunciation a method of translation.6 [End Page 218] English should not be the language of solidarity. I am twenty-two years old, watching the OJ Simpson trial on Swedish television. One of the LAPD detectives is on the stand. —Did you collect swatches on the crime scene? —Yes, we took Swatch watches, the on-screen captioning (un)translates. The racialized spectacle of the trial reminded me of where and what I came from, my cultural and political heritage, my racist homeland. Swedish liberal claims of tillsammans suddenly more sinister than that LA courtroom. Perhaps what is true for the untranslatability of fuck you is also true for BLM: it’s English-only, even in translation. A language where afrofobi can contain a chasm of antiblack feelings in atonal harmony with afrofili, white Swedes’ delight when they shop at AfroArt. Zora Neale Hurston translated by Glenn Ligon: (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), a piece from Untitled Four Etchings (1992), included in the first section of Citizen. After FI!’s BLM solidarity video, YouTube’s...

How do women’s poetic voices disrupt cultural forms? What is the relationship between female desire and the structures of poetry? Is ‘writing the body’ essentialist? Originally published in 1991, Impertinent Voices explores these questions in a sensitive and challenging study of female poetic strategies. Looking closely at the intricate and disturbing poetry of some of the twentieth century’s greatest poets – Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, H. D., Audre Lorde – Liz Yorke uses the theories of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva to illuminate her own clear and original analyses of the ways in which feminist understandings have been produced within poetic and cultural forms. Although they struggle with a language which has traditionally excluded female sexuality and subjectivity, women poets refuse to be silenced. Their ‘impertinent’ voices break out of the constraining myths of the prevailing culture, precipitating new beginnings and new ways of looking at the world. Detailed close readings of the poems are here matched with a clear theoretical approach, making this both an exciting exploration of new terrain and an excellent introduction to the ways in which, for women writers, theoretical models and creative practice work hand in hand.

Este artigo busca analisar como as escritoras norte-americanas Audre Lorde e Adrienne Rich elaboram o ato de nomear enquanto um conceito teórico-poético, o qual também pode ser compreendido como uma prática feminista. O objetivo é, portanto, apresentar como essas autoras produzem em seus ensaios e poemas uma escrita que é simultaneamente poética e teórica, enquanto se rebelam contra o paradigma da universalidade forjado pelo cânone literário acadêmico ocidental e constroem um pensamento comprometido com a sobrevivência das mulheres e pessoas dissidentes. Assim, o artigo propõe uma leitura do poema “Uma litania pela sobrevivência” e dos ensaios “A transformação do silêncio em linguagem e em ação (1977)” e “A poesia não é um luxo (1977)”, de Audre Lorde em diálogo com o poema “Tempo norte-americano” e os ensaios “Quando da morte acordamos (1971/76)” e “Sangue, pão e poesia: a localização da poeta (1984)”, de Adrienne Rich.

greatunpublished.com, 2000, Title No. 65. 86 pp. $11.99 (p); $7.99 (e-book). greatunpublished.com 2002, Title No. 251. 127 pp. $11.99 (p); $7.99 (e-book). Nancy Shiffrin's poetry, collected in The Holy Letters, is reminiscent such feminist poets as Margaret Atwood, Audre Lorde, and, especially -- because the highlighted Jewish themes -- Adrienne Rich. The Holy Letters is a book to set alongside these other writers' and to cherish for richness emotions and vividness metaphor. There is no shrinking or prudery here; the author confronts the body frankly, patriarchal repression with rightful anger. The contemporary world, environmental depradation, poverty, inner-city suffering, is harsh and cruel, and the poet responds with great sadness and a search for hope, ending her book with a section entitled For Life. Other sections deal with geography and memory, pregnancy and abortion, unhappy or traumatized children, aging, love, death, and multiple longings: for art, for skill, for erotic adventure. Several poems indicate Jewish themes explicitly through their titles -- Yom Kippur, Shabbat, Kosher, Seder, My Holocaust, Yahrzeit, and Rosh Chodesh -- and many others grapple with Jewish culture and history. Interestingly, the poems most concerned with Jewishness are clustered near the beginning and end the volume, suggesting that the author finds her origins in Jewish culture and returns to those origins ineluctably. One poem is actually entitled Return, and describes the poet's visit to Romania, where her zada came from. The penultimate the volume's ten sections, Covenant, deals exclusively with Jewish religion. Shiffrin clearly falls into a tradition politicized Jewish poets alert to abuses power. The little girl who speaks to us in her naive child's voice mysteries such as the Passover story, neighborhood Jew-hatred, and the gas chambers mutates into the grown woman who feels within her own self the universality human cruelty. In Grief, the persona seeems almost faux-naive, observing the savagery cats and nasty children, reading of Pol Pot's Butcher, research[ing] theories evil, witnessing a murder virtually on her own doorstep, yet unable to name or fully inhabit her own response. A few pages later, though, in Gardening, she is haunted even as she weeds by the idea genocide as weeding-out, and feels implicated in such evil merely by her human tendency to seek cleanliness and control, and therefore to destroy some living things while nurturing others. The poem ends in anguished, disappointed hope: I want to place stone on stone, restore myth rebuild grand processional stairways. …

I am deeply honored to participate in this retrospective on Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence." Approximately fifteen years ago, I enrolled in an undergraduate course entitled "Women and Difference: Marginality, Art, and Politics." Co-taught by Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff, the class transformed me intellectually, politically, and personally. The education that I received in this setting differed dramatically from the curriculum of my first year in college. Instead of the universalizing humanistic discourse of western civilization, a canon dominated by the great white and male thinkers of western culture, my feminist studies course focused on women "perceived as 'different' (spinsters, lesbians, women of color, Jewish women, women with disabilities, women without children)." 1 Specifically, the class examined how these women used their marginality as inspiration for political critique as well as artistic and intellectual creativity. Through the readings and lectures, I learned about the lives and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, Agnes Smedley, and Virginia Woolf, almost all of them previously unknown to me. The class laid two crucial foundations for my subsequent intellectual development: 1) It opened my eyes to the ways in which university curricula, that is, the construction and presentation of knowledge, can mask the diversity of human experience, and 2) I realized the importance of intersectionality for understanding the social dynamics of power and the multi-faceted nature of identities. These insights provide the basis of my reflections on the impact and relevance of Rich's 1980 groundbreaking essay on my present field of expertise, Asian American history.

Adrienne Cecile Rich (b. 16 May 1929 in Baltimore, MD; d. 27 March 2012 in Santa Cruz, CA) is one of the best-known feminist poets, essayists, and activists from the 1950s onward into the 21st century. She published about twenty-six volumes of poetry, six collections of essays, and quite a number of individual essays in numerous journals or as single volumes. She gave hundreds of interviews, and the scholarly studies on her work are too numerous to be counted. In most of her poems and essays, Rich focused on her own and, thus, a woman’s relationship to a world that she described as patriarchal, with predetermined and fixed gender roles that made being a successful poet, having a family, and being a mother and wife incompatible—an experience depicted in “‘When We Dead Awaken’: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971). This self-exploration and yearning to understand how she herself might fit into a male-dominated world shaped Rich’s poetry and prose, accompanied by a strong sense of social criticism. She received a number of prestigious awards, prizes, and fellowships, among them the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, for her first collection of poems, A Change of World (1951); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952); the National Book Award for Poetry (1974); honorary doctorates from Smith College (1979) and Harvard University (1989); several lifetime achievement awards; the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2006); and many more. In the late 1960s, she joined Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde on the faculty of the City College of New York and, thus, took her first steps into the African American and, to some extent, lesbian community. The year 1970 was a turning point in her life and career, with the divorce from her husband and his subsequent suicide and the publication of poetry that inaugurated her rise as a leading feminist figure. In the course of the 1970s, she came out as a lesbian (see “It Is the Lesbian in US . . .” [1976], The Dream of a Common Language [1978], and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” [1980]) and turned to political activism. Her long essay Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) has become her most frequently discussed work, in which she distinguishes between motherhood as a personal experience and motherhood as an institution that controls women. To being a woman, a mother, a writer, and a lesbian, she later added her concerns about her own Jewishness. In the 1980s, her poetry and prose became manifestations of her own physical pain and remained true to her idea of the “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1978). For Rich, the feminist slogan “the personal is the political” was always true. After 2000 she participated in antiwar movements and continued to write poetry and prose. From 1976 until her death in 2012, she lived with her partner, the Jamaican-born writer and editor Michelle Cliff, in California.

“Communicating deep feeling in linear solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me” — Audre Lorde in an interview with Adrienne Rich (Lorde 87) How do you disclose? In writing, in spoken words, in movements, in sounds, in the quiet energetic vibration and its trace in discourse? Is disclosure a narrative account of a self, or a poetic fragment, sent into the world outside the sanction of a story or another recognisable form (see fig. 1)?These are the questions that guide my exploration in this essay. I meditate on them from the vantage point of my own self-narrative, as a community performance practitioner and writer, a poet whose artistry, in many ways, relies on the willingness of others to disclose, to open themselves, and yet who feels ambivalent about narrative disclosures. What I share with you, reader, are my thoughts on what some may call compassion fatigue, on boredom, on burn-out, on the inability to be moved by someone’s hard-won right to story her life, to tell his narrative, to disclose her pain. I find it ironic that for as long as I can remember, my attention has often wandered when someone tells me their story—how this cancer was diagnosed, what the doctors did, how she coped, how she garnered support, how she survived, how that person died, how she lived. The story of how addiction took over her life, how she craved, how she hated, how someone sponsored her, listened to her, how she is making amends, how she copes, how she gets on with her life. The story of being born this way, being prodded this way, being paraded in front of doctors just like this, being operated on, being photographed, being inappropriately touched, being neglected, being forgotten, being unloved, being lonely. Listening to these accounts, my attention does wander, even though this is the heart blood of my chosen life—these are the people whose company I seek, with whom I feel comfortable, with whom I make art, with whom I make a life, to whom I disclose my own stories. But somehow, when we rehearse these stories in each others’s company (for rehearsal, polishing, is how I think of storytelling), I drift. In this performance-as-research essay about disclosure, I want to draw attention to what does draw my attention in community art situations, what halts my drift, and allows me to find connection beyond a story that is unique and so special to this individual, but which I feel I have heard so many times. What grabs me, again and again, lies beyond the words, beyond the “I did this… and that… and they did this… and that,” beyond the story of hardship and injury, recovery and overcoming. My moment of connection tends to happen in the warmth of this hand in mine. It occurs in the material connection that seems to well up between these gray eyes and my own deep gaze. I can feel the skin change its electric tonus as I am listening to the uncoiling account. There’s a timbre in the voice that I follow, even as I lose the words. In the moment of verbal disclosure, physical intimacy changes the time and space of encounter. And I know that the people I sit with are well aware of this—it is not lost on them that my attention isn’t wholly focused on the story they are telling, that I will have forgotten core details when next we work together. But they are also aware, I believe, of those moments of energetic connect that happen through, beyond and underneath the narrative disclosure. There is a physical opening occurring here, right now, when I tell this account to you, when you sit by my side and I confess that I can’t always keep the stories of my current community participants straight, that I forget names all the time, that I do not really wish to put together a show with lots of testimony, that I’d rather have single power words floating in space.Figure 1. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performer: Neil Marcus.”water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. Orientation towards the Frame: A Poetics of VibrationThis essay speaks about how I witness the uncapturable in performance, how the limits of sharing fuel my performance practice. I also look at the artistic processes of community performance projects, and point out traces of this other attention, this poetics of vibration. One of the frames through which I construct this essay is a focus on the formal in practice: on an attention to the shapes of narratives, and on the ways that formal experimentation can open up spaces beyond and beneath the narratives that can sound so familiar. An attention to the formal in community practice is often confused with an elitist drive towards quality, towards a modern or post-modern play with forms that stands somehow in opposition to how “ordinary people” construct their lives. But there are other ways to think about “the formal,” ways to question the naturalness with which stories are told, poems are written, the ease of an “I”, the separation between self and those others (who hurt, or love, or persecute, or free), the embedment of the experience of thought in institutions of thinking. Elizabeth St. Pierre frames her own struggle with burn-out, falling silent, and the need to just keep going even if the ethical issues involved in continuing her research overwhelm her. She charts out her thinking in reference to Michel Foucault’s comments on how to transgress into a realm of knowing that stretches a self, allows it “get free of oneself.”Getting free of oneself involves an attempt to understand the ‘structures of intelligibility’ (Britzman, 1995, p. 156) that limit thought. Foucault (1984/1985) explaining the urgency of such labor, says, ‘There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all’ (p. 8). (St. Pierre 204)Can we think outside the structure of story, outside the habits of thought that make us sense and position ourselves in time and space, in power and knowledge? Is there a way to change the frame, into a different format, to “change our mind”? And even if there is not, if the structures of legibility always contain what we can think, there might be riches in that borderland, the bordercountry towards the intelligible, the places where difference presses close in an uncontained, unstoried way. To think differently, to get free of oneself: all these concerns resonate deeply with me, and with the ways that I wish to engage in community art practice. Like St. Pierre, I try to embrace Deleuzian, post-structuralist approaches to story and self:The collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. […] To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call myself (moi). I is an order word. (Deleuze and Guattari 84).“I” wish to perform and to write at the moment when the chorus of the voices that make up my “I” press against my skin, from the inside and the outside, query the notion of ‘skin’ as barrier. But can “I” stay in that vibrational moment? This essay will not be an exercise in quotation marks, but it is an essay of many I’s, and—imagine you see this essay performed—I invite the vibration of the hand gestures that mark small breaches in the air next to my head as I speak.Like St. Pierre, I get thrown off those particular theory horses again and again. But curiosity drives me on, and it is a curiosity nourished not by the absence of (language) connection, by isolation, but by the fullness of those movements of touch and density I described above. That materiality of the tearful eye gaze, the electricity of those fine skin hairs, the voice shivering me: these are not essentialist connections that somehow reveal or disclose a person to me, but these matters make the boundaries of “me” and “person” vibrate. Disclose here becomes the density of living itself, the flowing, non-essential process of shaping lives together. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have called this bordering “deterritorialization,” always already bound to the reterritorialisation that allows the naming of the experience. Breath-touch on the limits of territories.This is not a shift from verbal to a privileging of non-verbal communication, finding richness and truth in one and less in the other. Non-verbal communication can be just as conventional as spoken language. When someone’s hand reaches out to touch someone who is upset, that gesture can feel ingrained and predictable, and the chain of caretaking that is initiated by the gesture can even hinder the flow of disclosure the crying or upset person might be engaged in. Likewise, I believe the common form of the circle, one I use in nearly every community session I lead, does not really create more community than another format would engender. The repetition of the circle just has something very comforting, it can allow all participants to drop into a certain kind of ease that is different from the everyday, but the rules of that ease are not open—circles territorialise as much as they de-territorialise: here is an inside, here an outside. There is nothing inherently radical in them. But circles might create a radical shift in communication situations when they break open other encrusted forms—an orientation to a leader, a group versus individual arrangement, or the singularity of islands out in space. Circles brings lots of multiples into contact, they “gather the tribes.” What provisional I’s we extract from them in each instance is our ethical challenge.Bodily Fantasies on the Limit: BurningEven deeply felt inner experiences do not escape the generic, and there is lift available in the vibration between the shared fantasy and the personal fantasy. I lead an artists’ collective, The Olimpias, and in 2008/2009, we cre

Elizabeth Alexander is considered of the country's most gifted contemporary poets, and the publication of her essays in Interior in 2004 established her as an astute critic and cultural commentator as well. Arnold Rampersad has called Alexander one of the brightest stars in our literary sky...a superb, invaluable commentator on the American scene. In this new collection of her essays, reviews, and essays, Alexander again focuses on African American artistic production, particularly poetry, and the cultural contexts in which it is created and experienced. The book's first section, Black Arts 101, takes up the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sterling Brown, Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove (among others); artist Romare Bearden, dancer Bill T. Jones, and dramatist August Wilson. second section, Black Feminist Thinking, provides engaging meditations ranging from Considering My Grandmother's Hair and A Very Short History of Women and Food to essays on the legacies of Toni Cade, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan. The collection's final section, Talking, includes interviews, a commencement address Black Graduation and the essay Africa and the World.

Page 4 American Book Review “This Instant and This Triumph”: Women of Color Publishing Introduction to Focus: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Focus Editor Women of color in the US have been using the printed word as a medium for imagination and protest for more than a century. In the 1800s, novelist Pauline Hopkins was a co-founder of the collective Colored American Magazine, where she published short stories and serial novels that imagined the equality of the races as a rational and achievable future.Antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells co-founded her own newspaper, and when her offices were burned to the ground, she rallied black women and raised the funds to publish pamphlets on lynching and racist mob rule in theAmerican South. In the mid-twentieth century, Chicana feminists in the US invoked the memory of Las Hijas de Cuahtemoc, women who fought in the Mexican Revolution, as they created a network of campus-based newspapers and anthologies through which to theorize the relevance and contours of Chicana feminism. In the early 1980s, a group of women including Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde (from whose “Litany for Survival” the title of this piece comes), and Cherríe Moraga came together to found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which published Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983) and kept This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color (1983) in print for more than a decade. Though women of color sustained publishing initiatives before and throughout the twentieth century , the very act of what this section calls “Women of Color Publishing” is embattled and almost counter-intuitive. The dominant narratives of state policy and the cherished “great work” of American literature have not characterized women of color as intellectuals or important cultural producers. Instead, women of color have been caricaturized as reproducers of domestic stability in the homes of the literarily relevant, and deviant reproducers of pathological cultures of poverty at worst. And further, as the selfproclaimed “third world feminists” in the US asserted in the 1980s, neither the seeming refuges of feminist publishing or third-world publishing supported the critical voices of women of color. Women of color producing literary texts (or anything else) on their own terms smacks of danger. In the 1970s when eventual Nobel laureate Toni Morrison used her tokenized role within a mainstream publishing house to encourage the work of black women writers such as Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, their work was met with an intense critical backlash from black male critics who attacked , not the literary merit of Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) or Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf (1975), but rather the supposedly “divisive” audacity of the authors in representing and responding to rape and domestic violence against women in their texts. Morrison and other black women writers working in that time period, including Walker, Shange, June Jordan, VèVè Clark, and others, realized that autonomous publishing was the only way to create space for their voices. In a collective called “The Sisterhood,” these women envisioned a publishing company called Kizzy Enterprises that would have operated out of Shange’s house, funded on a profitless basis and through which they intended to keep texts that they deemed crucial in print and available. When Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa brought together writings by radical women of color to protest the abusive tokenization of women of color in the mainstream feminist movement and to create a viable network for women of color, the feminist publisher Persephone Press was not willing or able color presses in this moment reaches beyond the publication of women of color by women of color for women of color; this section features work that ranges from essays, critical analysis, poetry, fiction, interactive art and work authored by multi-racial groups of women, women of color collectives, men of color, and like-minded people of many genders and backgrounds. However, these works are far from generalist, and each creates an intimate relationship that assumes the participation of readers in a shared project of transformation. RedBone Press Lisa Moore founded RedBone Press after successfully publishing the groundbreaking anthology Does...