Steps Leading to the Sky: June Jordan’s Black Feminist Frictions

My research in the correspondence archives of Audre Lorde and June Jordan build upon pre-existing scholarship on Jordan’s activism by Keith P. Feldman and Erica R. Edwards. To date, Erica Edwards and Alexis Pauline Gumbs are the only scholars to have briefly discussed the archive detailing Lorde and Jordan’s disagreement, which she highlights as evidence of the sometimes fraught nature of “Black feminist experiments with third worldism.” Though the record of the conversation that led to their falling out is openly available in Audre Lorde’s archive, most scholars have not yet fully considered the ideological difference between the two poets that surfaced in this epistolary disagreement. This is perhaps because it brings up prickly, undigestible truths about a treasured literary ancestor: Lorde essentially chooses her friendship with a white woman and self-identified Zionist over Jordan, a Black woman protesting a brutal war of aggression against Palestinian and Lebanese people. There is a silence in scholarship around Lorde and Jordan’s strained relationship post-1982, perhaps because the information disrupts the idea of a coherent Black feminist politics created by an ideologically-aligned group of Black women in the 1970s and 1980s. But now more than ever, it is important to disarticulate the legacies of different Black feminist thinkers, to consider the practice and the limitations of Black American feminists anti-imperialist solidarities, and to critically examine blind spots in Third World coalition-building of the 1970s and 1980s.