Full Description
Audre Lorde was not only a famous black poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past half century. I Am Your Sister collects her non-fiction prose from 1976 to 1990, and it is the first volume to provide a full picture of Lorde's political work (as opposed to her aesthetic work). The essays cover an impressive variety of topics: sexuality, race, gender, culture, class, parenting, disease, resistance, and power--both within the United States and across the African diaspora. While Lorde is best known as a progenitor of black feminist studies, I Am Your Sister stresses her signal influence in the creation of gay and lesbian studies. Lorde's work presaged the late 1980s shift in the academy toward the emphasis on the tight connections between race, class, gender, and sexuality--and later disability. Accordingly, the breadth of topics Lorde tackles in the various essays in I Am Your Sister capture the spirit of intersectionality that now dominates analysis in the humanities and critical social sciences.
Contents
Dedication ; Acknowledgements ; INTRODUCTION: CREATE YOUR OWN FIRE: AUDRE LORDE AND THE TRADITION OF BLACK RADICAL THOUGHT ; PART I.: FROM SISTER OUTSIDER AND A BURST OF LIGHT ; The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action ; Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface ; Sadomasochism: Not About Condemnation ; I Am Your Sister: Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities ; Apartheid USA ; Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting 1986 ; A Burst of Light: Living With Cancer ; PART II.: MY WORDS WILL BE THERE ; Eva's Man by Gayle Jones: A Review ; Self-Definition and My Poetry ; Introduction: Movement in Black by Pat Parker ; My Words Will Be There" from Black Women Writers ; Introduction to Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Suren ihrer Geschichte ; Preface: Need: A Chorale for Black Women Voices ; Poet As Teacher-Human As Poet-Teacher as Human ; Poetry Makes Something Happen ; My Mother's Mortar ; PART III.: DIFFERENCE AND SURVIVAL ; Difference and Survival: An Address at Hunter College ; The First Black Feminist Retreat ; When Will the Ignorance End? Keynote Address at the First National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference ; Litany of Commitment: An Address Delivered at the March on Washington, (1983) ; Commencement Address: Oberlin College ; There Is No Hierarchy of Oppression ; What is at Stake in Lesbian and Gay Publishing Today: the Bill Whitehead Award Ceremony ; Is Your Hair Still Political? ; PART IV.: REFLECTIONS ; Audre Lorde: My Shero, My Teacher, My Sister Friend ; Audre's Voice ; The Imagination of Justice ; Remembering Audre Lorde ; CONCLUSION, BEARING WITNESS: THE LEGACY OF AUDRE LORDE ; Contributors ; Selected Bibliography ; Chronology ; Index
