June Jordan Research Articles

Learning from June Jordan and Walt Whitman (and from Las Vegas, too): Notes on Inclusivity and Borders

Learning from June Jordan and Walt Whitman (and from Las Vegas, too): Notes on Inclusivity and Borders

ПОЕТ ЯК КРИТИК: ЕЛІЗАБЕТ АЛЕКСАНДЕР ПРО КЛАСИКІВ АФРО-АМЕРИКАНСЬКОЇ ЛІТЕРАТУРИ

У статті розглядається есеїстичний доробок сучасної афро-американ-ської поетеси Елізабет Александер, яка у 2000-х роках виступила як лі-тературний критик, видавши збірки «The Black Interior» (2004) та «The Power and Possibility» (2007), і як редактор книги «The Essential Gwendo-lyn Brooks» (2005). Наукова новизна розвідки полягає у тому, що вперше у вітчизняній американістиці розглядається есеїстика Елізабет Александер у світлі «чорних»/афро-американських студій. Досліджуються кл`v bnmbvczючові проблеми нехудожнього доробку письменниці: своєрідність мистецтва та літератури афро-американців, «чорного» фемінізму, расизму, афро-амери-канської ідентичності. У збірці «The Power and Possibility» письменниця представляє свій погляд на сучасну афро-американську культуру, зосеред-жуючи аналіз на сферах літератури, кінематографу, малярства та музики. Іконічними фігурами, про творчість яких розмірковує Елізабет Александер, стають Пол Лоренс Данбар, Гвендолін Брукс, Ленгстон Хьюз, Ріта Дав, Джун Джордан, Люсіль Кліфтон тощо. Зроблено висновок про новаторство літературно-критичного доробку письменниці, що полягає не лише у ви-вченні творчості митців афро-американців, але й їх діяльності з популяри-зації «чорної» естетики, в дослідженні тематики, літературних технік «чор-ного» мистецтва (Black Arts aesthetics) та аналізі ідей «чорного» фемінізму.

Dreaming “for Real”: June Jordan’s His Own Where as Youth History

Dreaming “for Real”: June Jordan’s His Own Where as Youth History

The New Sentence: June Jordan and the Politics of Parataxis

The aim of the paper is to compare and contrast a few select ways in which the poetic use of parataxis can convey a specific political message. Parataxis is understood here broadly, as a certain organizational principle based on a cycle of denarrativization and renarrativization. The first part of the paper reflects on the role the paratactic technique has played within the language of the reactionary populists, both historically and in the recent years. Then, building on the observation that the denarrativized, seemingly „straightforward” nature of the paratactic speech makes it particularly useful for the purposes of right-wing populism, I ask whether parataxis can be reclaimed as a progressive force. In order to answer this question, I go back to some of the issues discussed by Ron Silliman, Fredric Jameson and Bob Perelman in the context of the Language movement and the so-called New Sentence. Here, the work of de- and renarrativization performed as a consequence of the paratactic loosening of conventional textual links and structures is seen as a direct response to the denarrativized nature of everyday life under late capitalism. In the final part of the paper, I contrast the New Sentence parataxis with a more practical, more spontaneous (albeit more conventional) approach embodied by June Jordan. The paratactic structures of her writing remain focused on denarrativization in all of its disruptive and provocative potential, allowing for a certain kind of immediate political intervention.

The Early Developments of Black Women’s Studies in the Lives of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde

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.”

May, June

May, June Talia Shalev (bio) I had hadenough. As flowersdry upsidedown and keep the housefrom looking too,too dead, I wentto decoratemy bed withmyself. The knot inside my neckblooms intoterror onlywhen I've lostwhat I wanted to spit out ofhow unfaircollectingin my gums, rising wet undermy tongue Don'tsay that, I didn'tsay. Outside spring came, and menfilling our movingshadows witha slow walkto churn what might elsespoil in the new,the experimentalheat [End Page 64] Talia Shalev Talia Shalev's poems have appeared in The Seattle Review and The Volta. She is a co-editor of Life Studies, 1966-1976, featuring materials from June Jordan's archive. Talia teaches at Brooklyn College, works as a writing associate at The Cooper Union, and is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center. Copyright © 2018 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents

Writing/Not Writing: Anne Boyer, Paralipsis, and Literary Work

Writing/Not Writing:Anne Boyer, Paralipsis, and Literary Work Lindsay Turner (bio) The contemporary American poet anne boyer (b. 1973) investigates the affects and textures of life and work under the pressures of today's neoliberal capitalism. Boyer, who lives and writes in Kansas City, Kansas, joins contemporary writers such as bhanu kapil, christopher nealon, sandra simonds, and catherine wagner in plumbing ordinary experience with an ear constantly attuned to the political structures that underpin it. In this respect, these writers follow in the line of earlier U.S. poets such as diane di prima, june jordan, bernadette mayer, alice notley, or even the New York School's frank o'hara, for whom poetic production necessarily occurs alongside other types of work. For these writers, both poetry writing and the array of other labor they perform (from university teaching to domestic labor to museum work) are indelibly shaped by the changing configurations of political power, U.S.-led globalization, and gender, race, and local and global economic inequality that mark the past half-century. Boyer's third book, Garments Against Women (2015), was written in 2010, during a time Boyer has characterized as one of personal precariousness and concern. As she states in a 2015 conversation with poet amy king, which appeared on the Poetry Foundation's blog: "My daughter [End Page 121] and I were struggling, then, in the kind of poverty in which you are always getting sick from stress and overwork and shitty food then having no insurance or money or time to treat the problems caused by having no insurance or money or time."1 Beyond the immediate conditions of its creation, the book spins out an expansive set of reflections on work and the refusal of work in the contemporary moment. Boyer's poems—which are primarily prose poems—unfold through and beyond the speaker's everyday life as a mother and writer: dramatizing ordinary dilemmas of thought and work (including daily domestic and reproductive work, the process of writing or being unable to write, and, as its title suggests, sewing and other forms of garment manufacture), Garments Against Women encompasses linked problems of reproduction, globalization, knowledge, resistance, creativity, transformation, and even, finally, the future of work. A key premise in Boyer's poetry, though, is that she writes about such matters largely by not writing about them. She does so, in other words, by deploying or riffing on the rhetorical figure of paralipsis: stating something through the claim not to be stating it. Through her recourse to this figure, I argue, Boyer articulates the complex interrelationships between types and problems of labor, precisely insofar as they tend to remain unspoken under conditions of late capitalism. Garments Against Women stitches together a poetic discourse that discloses its continuity with and as labor—rather than standing apart from it as sublimated art. For Boyer, poetic labor, frequently expressed as paralipsis (that is, as the work of not-saying), stands beside other forms and practices of working and not working. In Boyer's hands, paralipsis thus opens up onto some of the practical and epistemological contradictions of life under contemporary global capital, as well as questions of gender and subjectivity that (often silently) undergird one's experience of such contradictions. Troping on the paraliptic movement of her poetry, what Boyer calls "not writing" is, in fact, working—working in a sense that extends to the entire sphere of the biopolitical insofar as it accounts for the saturation of all human life by capital, including work and nonwork. In the poem "What is Not Writing," for example, Boyer states: "Not writing is working, and when not working at paid work working at unpaid work like caring for others, and when not at unpaid work like caring, caring also for a human body, [End Page 122] and when not caring for a human body … caring for the mind."2 There is a sense of limitlessness to this list. At stake generally is a form of precarity in the contemporary neoliberal economy: an alienation distributed unevenly but pervasively across the material realities of almost all forms of contemporary life and labor, which renders them ungraspable, difficult, or impossible to comprehend...

Furia

Using a productive deployment of the double elegy, poets Lucille Clifton and June Jordan carve out a space of maternal retrieval to negotiate the loss of their creative yet stifled mothers. In doing so, both writers engender fury as a mechanism of propelled delineation, allowing them to explore the contours of their own artistic ambition, using their mothers as focal points. Embedded in this retrieval is the acknowledgment of suppressed agony both writers recognize as belonging to their mothers. “Furia” positions this acknowledgment at the center of the framework of literary production for Clifton and Jordan, as part of the way they privilege the creative world their mothers produced for them.

June Jordan: A Third-Wave Feminist towards a Gendered- Democratic Poetics

June Jordan: A Third-Wave Feminist towards a Gendered- Democratic Poetics

Intifada Incantation #2

This work examines how June Jordan's poetry dedicated to solidarity is a pedagogical and epistemological framework in SOLHOTLex and in engaging Black girls around the interconnectedness of the occupation of Palestine and the genocide of Syrians under the Bashar Al Assad regime. It begins to answer the questions of how frameworks like womanism and postcolonial feminist theory inform engagement around solidarity in SOLHOTLex and organizing Black girls while examining what critical engagement and organizing looks like when the voices of Black girls are in symphony with the rest of the world's resistance struggles.

An Examination of Poetry for the People: A Decolonizing Holistic Approach to Arts Education

This article is concerned with the epidemic of alienation created by colonization and the ideologies that maintain systems of domination. More specifically, it argues that a decolonizing holistic pedagogy can help address the root of our individual and collective alienation to facilitate healing. This position is supported by the findings of an ethnographic study, conducted in 2013–2014, highlighting Poetry for the People (P4P), an arts/activism course started by poet-activist-professor, June Jordan, at UC Berkeley. The article opens with a theoretical framework that centers healing and love as decolonial priorities and pedagogical imperatives, and speaks to the mindbodyspirit labor, restoration, and creativity involved in decolonizing education. Emphasizing the need for decolonizing epistemologies to inform classroom dialogue, this article points to the power inherent in those dialogues for creating connections that mend alienation and for generating apertures for personal and social transformation. However, it is the voices of the P4P participants interviewed that give testimony to the effectiveness of a decolonizing holistic pedagogy to foster rigorous investigation of self and society, authentic community-building across difference, as well as the healing power of writing, sharing, and witnessing others share personal/political poetry.

Words of witness: black women's autobiography in the post-Brown era

A literary and political genealogy of last half-century, Words of Witness explores black feminist autobiographical narratives in context of activism and history since landmark 1954 segregation case, Brown v. Board of Education. Angela A. Ards examines how activist writers, especially five whose memoirs were published in 1990s and 2000s, crafted these life stories to engage and shape progressive, post-Brown politics. Exploring works by critically acclaimed June Jordan and Edwidge Danticat, as well as by popular and emerging authors such as Melba Beals, Rosemary Bray, and Eisa Davis, Ards demonstrates how each text asserts countermemories to official-and often nostalgic-understandings of Civil Rights and Black Power movements. She situates each writer as activist-citizen, adopting and remaking particular roles-warrior, the least of these, immigrant, hip-hop head-to crystallize a range of black feminist responses to urgent but unresolved political issues.

Make Revolution Irresistible: The Role of the Cultural Worker in the Twenty-First Century

I was introduced to the term public intellectual almost twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate in a literary course on African American music taught by the cultural critic Farah Jasmine Griffin. The class conversations began with readings of jazz and hip-hop artists as “organic intellectuals” in the sense developed by Antonio Gramsci. We quickly moved to the debates sparked by Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual (1993) and to the rise of the black public intellectual as demonstrated by the formation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of an academic “dream team” in African American studies at Harvard, Cornel West's publication of Race Matters (1994), and Robert Boynton's March 1995 article in the Atlantic entitled “The New Intellectuals,” which added Toni Morrison, Stanley Crouch, Patricia Williams, Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Bell, June Jordan, and many others to that category. By the time I arrived at Harvard in 1999, for graduate study in African American literature, the idea of the black public intellectual served as a backdrop and a blueprint for how my generation of scholars could live inside and beyond the campus walls. As beneficiaries of that era, my peers and I did not necessarily have to prove that our work belonged in the public; instead, we had to wrestle with newer questions of format and forum in the digital age.

Progressive Communities, Children’s Literature, and Free to Be … You and Me

Progressive Communities, Children’s Literature, and Free to Be … You and Me Katharine Capshaw (bio) The children’s book version of Free to Be … You and Me became a powerful force in the lives of progressive young people in the 1970s. In addition to the 1972 record that began the Free to Be project and alongside the television special that followed the book’s publication, the children’s book offered textual stability to the feminist concepts offered in all of the project’s incarnations. But what struck me as a young person in the early 1970s was its interracial visual aesthetic, its photographs of various children sitting happily side by side. I was raised in a family that resembled few others at the time. I am white, as are two of my siblings; my brother is African American; and my sister is African American and Vietnamese American. My parents were progressive thinkers and activists and they raised us in Columbia, Maryland, a township founded in 1967 with the goal of social change. We lived in a community that featured interfaith centers rather than churches, “village centers” with housing of varied economic levels, and shared community schools that actively promoted integration. In many ways it seemed an ideal setting for our family. At the same time, Columbia was in fact located below the Mason-Dixon Line, and popular culture and social realities conspired to make us feel conspicuous in many ways. Even in Columbia, Maryland, my siblings and I experienced hostility, especially from other children, for being a “mixed” family. This is part of the reason why Thomas’s book, album, and television program seemed a blessing, an idealized place where children like us could be comfortable in ourselves and in our love for each other. My own work as an academic focuses on African American childhood and social change and I recognize the influence of Free to Be on my own [End Page 287] investments. Through the book and television program, I experienced the transformative possibilities of interracial representation. Here I’d like to consider briefly Marlo Thomas’s book within the context of post-1960s social activism in order to emphasize its coherence with progressive children’s literature at large.1 While the book was certainly distinctive in countering sexist expectations for children’s socialization, its methodology shared certain tendencies with activist children’s literature, particularly that which addressed racism, during the early 1970s. In the wake of the early civil rights movement, after the losses of the “four little girls” in the 1963 Birmingham bombing and the assassinations of Malcolm X, the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many other civil rights figures, the cultural moment of the early 1970s for black communities was tinged with frustration and despair. The response in black children’s literature emphasized continued child commitment to social change. For instance, feminist writer June Jordan urged readers in her photographic children’s book Dry Victories to “do something about this after-mess of aftermath, following on so much tragedy” (1972, 75). The imperative to take action, to intervene in social relations, structured much of the literary work for children within black communities at this moment. Further, the black arts movement (BAM) of the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraged an art that was functional, one that reeducated communities about the harmful effects of white education and literacies. Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), within Larry Neal’s 1968 essay “The Black Arts Movement,” addressed American and children’s literature, as well as the totalizing process of literacy training, by asserting, “We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil” (Neal 1968, 29). In response, BAM writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Jean Carey Bond, Sam Cornish, Tom Feelings, Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Guy, Kristin Hunter, Julius Lester, Sharon Bell Mathis, Sonia Sanchez, and Jean Pajot Smith offered experimental, participatory texts for young people, including poetry, photography, drama, coloring books, and prose narratives. Bolstered by the 1965 Elementary and Secondary School Act, the founding of the Council on Interracial Books for Children in 1966, and the creation of the Coretta Scott King Award by the American Library Association in 1970, black writers for...

Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality

Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized , in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance ,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property ,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself...

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

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.

Wilson, Ivy G., ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Ivy G. Wilson, ed. Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. xx + 210 pp.Halfway through Ivy G. Wilson's Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet, Christopher Freeburg writes: Whitman was a racist, and he did subscribe to white supremacist ideas and (90). Freeburg's assessment here intuits, I think, contradiction sometimes complicates this necessary and often thrilling collection of essays. For many, remains democratic poet of America, and so confusion easily abounds when Whitman's racist politics are unearthed. This is a pertinent issue cropped up last year at Northwestern University-where Wilson works-when M.A. music student Timothy McNair protested vaunting of as a democrat by refusing to perform a musical setting of his poetry, which led to a failing course grade. Instead of definitively sorting out Whitman's attitudes toward Afro Americans, Noir productively engages his conflicted inheritance, paying homage to an underappreciated and longstanding tradition of black authors embracing rather than rejecting Whitman's poetry. Natasha Trethewey exemplifies this collection's wide-ranging engagement with on race when she writes, From where I stand, it's easy to feel kinds of contradictions evident in Whitman's work, those things he revealed both intentionally and inadvertently (171). Indeed, Whitman's specters of blackness, and our own haunting by his white supremacy, offer another valence to noir of this collection's title, all more striking for its understatement.Whitman Noir is divided into two parts, first comprised of scholarly essays on relation of to blackness and of subsequent black writers to by-aside from Wilson and Freeburg-Ed Folsom, Amina Gautier, Matt Sandler, and Jacob Wilkenfeld. The second part of book reprints previously published personal and political reflections on by Trethewey and June Jordan, as well as publishes for first time short pieces by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (on Garcia Lorca and Whitman) and George Hutchinson (on visiting Whitman's home and grave in Camden). C. L. R. James, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Martin Delany, James Weldon Johnson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with many of book's own contributors, provide testament to diverse ways black writers have invoked Whitman. This is a reckoning is consistently laudatory and skeptical, if not downright aghast, of Whitman. One can appreciate, for instance, Jordan's deep alienation from her New Critical schooling while being confounded by her lament over the peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman-which, thankfully, seems dated today (157). It is hard not to love, though, her earnest and playful pronouncement: Listen to this white father; he is so weird (158).The first three essays of this collection-by Folsom, Gautier, and Sandler-are most striking. Folsom shows how Whitman's temporary persona as mash'd in Song of Myself is based upon-both historically and in poet's drafts-a black fireman (unmentioned in published poem) for whom white faces become visible: White and beautiful are faces around me, heads are bared of their fire-caps (5). Whitman, we learn, erases blackness in legible ways, inscribing through development of his corpus formative presence as well as increasing absence of slaves and freedmen. In following essay, Gautier mines Whitman's 1842 temperance novel Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate with dogged singularity, emerging with sterling conclusion Evans' storied self-possession is only won through his ownership of Louis-the brother of creole slave Margaret to whom Evans is briefly married. Whitman shows, writes Gautier, that Evans' own self-mastership is ultimately dependent upon his ownership of Louis (47). thereby unravels intemperance is slavery metaphor animated Washingtonian temperance reformers of time, showing how temperance here literally means mastery over another. …

Intimate internationalisms: 1970s ‘Third World’ queer feminist solidarity with Chile

This article theorises the relationship between 1970s US Third World queer and feminist movements and Latin American anti-imperialist revolutions of the late twentieth century. I focus upon the historically occluded relationships between Third World feminists and queers in Chile and the United States throughout the transition to neoliberalism. My archive includes June Jordan’s little-known writings on Chile, the writings of Audre Lorde, and, primarily, a 1973 Third World feminist poetry reading staged in San Francisco shortly after the Pinochet coup. By assembling this unconventional archive, I intervene into the domestication of US anti-racist queer, black and feminist of colour politics. I argue for the profoundly internationalist foundation of these formations. I work to re-animate a moment when the affective economies of anti-colonial ‘global revolution’ opened up space for the imagination of joint struggle – allowing a visceral sense of struggle’s urgency and vitality in ways that have since been partially eclipsed.

Infant Muse: Phillis Wheatley and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of Childhood

Infant MusePhillis Wheatley and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of Childhood Lucia Hodgson (bio) I believe no one would have published the poetry of Black Phillis Wheatley, that grown woman who stayed with her chosen Black man. … America has long been tolerant of Black children, compared to its reception of independent Black men and Black women. —June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” Phillis Wheatley’s mastery of popular belletristic conventions, her deployment of Christian evangelical rhetoric, and her manipulation of the colonist-as-slave analogy have all been cited as tactics that enabled her to adopt an intelligible and therefore consumable subjectivity. The strategies outlined above certainly contributed to Wheatley’s phenomenal transatlantic success. What has been less remarked is how all three maneuvers gained additional traction from their specific and direct engagement with Enlightenment conceptions of childhood articulated by John Locke, conceptions that constituted an essential component of the genre of occasional poetry, the ideology of the Great Awakening, and the rhetoric of Revolutionary patriots. Wheatley’s writing and marketing tapped into the eighteenth-century recognition of childhood as a status distinct from adulthood with its own unique set of weaknesses and strengths. The child figure of the early 1770s was simultaneously affiliated with varied and contradictory—yet primarily positive—characteristics, including malleability, obedience, and faith in authority. This constellation of attributes enabled Wheatley’s literary child persona to speak to her social superiors about family, religion, and politics while mitigating the threat associated with her wronged and enslaved African body. The child characters in Wheatley’s poetry have been the focus of much more scholarly analysis than her child authorial persona. Analysis of child [End Page 663] characters is a prominent component of the emerging field of early American childhood studies, which encompasses literature written for children as well as representations of children in literature for adults.1 Anna Mae Duane (Suffering 144–45) and Caroline Levander (40) have both analyzed Wheatley’s verses referencing her kidnapping from Africa in early childhood to make nuanced arguments about the cultural work performed by child figures in the process of American nation building. However, it is mainly contemporary children’s literature that has situated Wheatley as a child author.2 Children’s books like Kathryn Lasky’s A Voice of Her Own: The Story of Phillis Wheatley, Slave Poet (2003) and Kathryn Kilby Borland’s Phillis Wheatley: Young Revolutionary Poet (2005) concentrate their biographies on the fact that Wheatley was not only an enslaved poet but also a child poet. She composed her first extant poem at the age of eleven.3 She published her first poem at about the age of fourteen. She was about sixteen when she achieved international fame with her elegy for the Methodist minister George Whitefield. And she was about nineteen when she traveled to England to participate in and promote the publication of her collection of occasional verse, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). An examination of Wheatley’s self-presentation as a juvenile poet constitutes a third, rarely addressed dimension of early American studies: the child as producer of literature and voice of political critique. Wheatley scholarship, particularly research concerned with recuperating the poet’s agency, has characterized her as an adult woman rather than a girl child. In her incisive article, Joanna Brooks debunks the assertion of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that in 1772 Wheatley underwent an oral examination conducted by eighteen elite white Bostonian men to prove her ability to author her poems. In proposing “an alternative narrative of the making of Wheatley, one that assigns her a commanding role in the early stages of her public career” (5), Brooks transforms Gates’s “young African girl” and “African adolescent” (qtd. in Brooks 1) into a “black woman” (7) and an “enslaved woman poet” (13).4 In another example of scholarly adultification, Betsy Erkkilä argues that the American Revolution furnished “women,” including Wheatley and Abigail Adams, with “the language and metaphors to ‘foment’ further rebellion in their struggle for citizenship, suffrage, and full human rights” (227). Neither Brooks nor Erkkilä considers Wheatley’s youth in relation to her rhetorical...

From the Fringes of Empire: U.S. Third World Feminists in Solidarity with Chile

In your country how / do you say copper / for my country? — June Jordan