Naming Oppressions, Representing Empowerment: June Jordan’s and Suheir Hammad’s Poetic Projects

Abstract

The article aims to explore intersections between June Jordan’s and Suheir Hammad’s work to show how their writing is inscribed in a comparative analytic inspired by women of color critique, which names formations like minority and bourgeois nationalism to make evident their connection to neoliberal modes of power, as well as notions of normativity and value. In highlighting such an analytic, the article draws on Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson’s reading of women of color critique as a practice that “question[s] nationalist and identitarian modes of political organization and craft[s] alternative understandings of subjectivity, collectivity, and power” (2011, 2). In its stress on the impact of Jordan’s politics, philosophy, and thought on Hammad’s writing, the article paves the way for understanding the forms of influence and affiliation underlying the commitment to revisionary goals among women writers of color, whose history has been overlooked in the context of a broader American literary history. Arguably, by drawing links between these authors using an alternative model of anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist struggle, the article offers an alternative framework to understand literary tradition and genealogies, apart from normative paradigms and approaches.