June Jordan's Affective Environment (original) (raw)

Abstract

Abstract This paper argues that Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan began developing theories of affect in the late 1960s that foreground intersectional racial and gendered configurations as necessarily conditioning human and non-human relationality. Focusing on Jordan’s unpublished novel, Okay Now, and unpublished manual on land reform, the paper argues that Jordan’s work offers interrogations of affective relations with built and natural environment that prefigure the contemporary “affective turn” in critical theory. Such an argument serves, in part, as an exposition of the underacknowledged intellectual labor of Black feminists, as well as an introduction to nascent Black feminist ecocriticism. Rational By focusing on Jordan’s work and the U.S. South, this paper unveils the intersection between historical trauma, land and environment, and contemporary psychological damage related to what Saidiya Hartman and others have termed the “afterlife of slavery.” At the same time, it outlines the ways in which anti-Black structures of domination contribute to the continual, conspicuous under-citing of Black feminists’ contributions within the narrative of the genealogy of affect theory (with Jennifer C. Nash’s “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love Politics, and Post-Intersectionality” being one notable exception). This, despite clear evidence of the influence such work has had on affect studies, and shared anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-heteronormative orientation among these feminists and many affect theorists. Two underlying concerns prompt my investment in the re-drawing of an intellectual history of affect theory that highlights Black feminism: One is that the under-citation of such scholarship in disciplinary discourses presumably not directly related to race and/or gender studies is a product of the relegation of intersectional study to niche fields. And, two, is this under-citation’s relationship to general historiographies that have, in large part, evacuated the Black female subject as a fully constituted, historical, and social human being. By centering the emergence of an articulated theory of affect within a Black feminist tradition, I emphasize the ways in which this persistent presence of absence in histories of intellectual traditions can be understood as a continuum of the absences that haunt historiography, even “40 Years After Combahee,” as the 2017 NWSA Annual Conference is aptly titled. Works Cited Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Jordan, June. Okay Now, boxes 49.5-50.4, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, 1975, 1977, 1996. Jordan, June. More Than Enough, boxes 49.8 and 75.8, the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard, 1970, 1971. Nash, Jennifer C. “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality.” Meridians. 11.2 (2011): 1-24.

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