{"id":31155,"date":"2013-05-19T03:45:20","date_gmt":"2013-05-19T03:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=31155"},"modified":"2015-10-09T15:40:49","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T15:40:49","slug":"slippery-positions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=31155","title":{"rendered":"slippery positions"},"content":{"rendered":"

slippery positions<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The State<\/a>
\n2013-05-17<\/p>\n

Tiana Reid<\/a><\/strong>
\nColumbia University<\/em><\/p>\n

As a self-defined Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet, Audre Lorde<\/a> is the model representative for intersectionality<\/a>. As such, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches<\/a><\/em> has become a ubiquitous text in undergraduate courses, for the theory and practice of intersectionality; a way to look at what women\u2019s studies scholar Leslie McCall<\/a> calls \u201cthe relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations.\u201d Put crudely, intersectionality is an idea used to explain the links between positions or configurations of oppression. What\u2019s more, as a Caribbean-American (her parents were born in Barbados<\/a> and Carriacou<\/a>), we could say Lorde straddled two worlds\u2014or perhaps none at all.<\/p>\n

Lorde\u2019s poetry as poetry and not as purely a feminist rubric, however, has been written about far less. In Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde<\/a><\/em>, writer and scholar Alexis De Veaux<\/a> describes the genesis of the poem \u201cSahara,\u201d published in Lorde\u2019s 1978 book of poems, The Black Unicorn<\/a><\/em>, in a moment while Lorde was on a plane in 1977 that passed over the Sahara desert<\/a> after making a stop in Madrid to refuel. The poet, flying from New York City, was on her way to Lagos, Nigeria for FESTAC, the Second World African Festival of Arts and Culture<\/a>. Lorde\u2019s trip to Nigeria is meaningful not simply because the plane ride\u2014the birds-eye view of the vastness of the Sahara\u2014inspired the homonymous poem. By 1977, Nigeria had emerged as what De Veaux calls the \u201crichest black-ruled nation\u201d in Africa because of oil wealth. Bringing together Black activists, academics, writers, artists and spectators, FESTAC acted as a transnational spectacle establishing new political, literary and racial grounds.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most significant here is that despite the literal and symbolic coming together of a black diasporic vision in the name of arts and culture, Lorde stayed on the fringes and felt separate from some sense of a monolithic group identity, an identity based seemingly solely on race\u2014and not gender or sexuality.<\/strong> Lorde\u2019s participation and view on FESTAC is mostly shrouded in mystery but what we do have is the poem \u201cSahara.\u201d I read \u201cSahara\u201d through Lorde\u2019s trip to FESTAC and thus, envision landscapes of diaspora as heterogeneous and transformative. Her hesitation toward FESTAC parallels the poem\u2019s fluctuating hesitation toward the Sahara desert. I say hesitation rather than outright fear despite the all-encompassing terror that can be gleaned from Lorde\u2019s approach to the masculine desert: \u201cgrief of sand\u2026 male sand \/ terrifying sand.\u201d The hesitation emerges from the heterogeneous incarnations sand is allowed to take. Rocks, what sand is made of, take millions and millions of years to become sand, meaning the image of a desert can\u2019t be separated from its process, from its formation through finely divided particles, a prolonged breaking down…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

slippery positions The State 2013-05-17 Tiana Reid Columbia University As a self-defined Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet, Audre Lorde is the model representative for intersectionality. As such, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches has become a ubiquitous text in undergraduate courses, for the theory and practice of intersectionality; a way to look at what women\u2019s studies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,666,1196,8,25],"tags":[2954,14228,14229],"class_list":["post-31155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-gaylesbian","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-audre-lorde","tag-the-state","tag-tiana-reid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43148,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31155\/revisions\/43148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}