Topics in African-American Studies (380-0-25)

Topic

The Poetics and Erotics of Audre Lorde

Instructors

Bryana Jones

Meeting Info

Kresge Centennial Hall 2-425: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

In her complementary, progressive set of essays, "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" and "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde asserts that poetry - rather than being luxury or idle fantasy - is the "disciplined attention to the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me'" (37). Lorde defines poetry not as "sterile word play" but as "a revelatory distillation of experience" (37). Consequently, she situates the poetic in an inherent interrelation with the erotic, asserting that the erotic "is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing" (54). Moving through a framework that insists on acutely and fully feeling what we do, as well as on doing and distilling what we feel in a manner that is revelatory, this course seeks to engage in Black feminist praxis - thinking alongside Lorde's conceptualizations of poetry and the erotic - to carefully examine myriad articulations of queer Black existence and embodied experience.

Throughout the quarter, we will use these two essays from Sister Outsider as a springboard from which to explore the affective, intellectual, and creative significance of acute and full queer Black feelings and revelatory distillations of experience. These interventions are meant to highlight the ways that queer Black storytellers and tellers of queer Black stories - including poets, novelists, critical theorists, filmmakers, actors, painters, and performance artists - mobilize the poetic and erotic to access and articulate new modes of queer Black being, feeling, and doing.

Class Attributes

Advanced Expression
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area