June Jordan and Audre Lorde's Freedom Bridges

• In Event: Living This Bridge Called Our Backs: An Intergenerational Dialogue by Women of Color

Abstract

Difficult times call for poetry as a necessity. In this paper, I highlight the twinned social criticism and liberatory worldmaking that courses throughout June Jordan's poetry and Audre Lorde's public pedagogy. Inspired by This Bridge, I highlight Jordan and Lorde's work as the praxis and enactment of bridgework as mutually dependent dreaming and critiquing. In particular, I pay attention to the ways that these WOC feminists refused to participate in incremental and therefore cauterized dreams for human uplift. They simply were not willing to sequester anyone as savage, irreparably corrupt, or unworthy. In refreshed times of white male nationalism, this vision of third world feminism is not only not a luxury, it is what we have always needed.

Author

• Leigh Patel, University of California - Riverside