Thursday, Feb. 7, 2019
EMU 145–Crater Lake South, 12 p.m.
Feminism, Internationalism, State Power

The radical activist and writer June Jordan traveled to Nicaragua in 1983 as a field correspondent for Essence magazine. The trip produced some of the insurgent literature we have never read. Calling for a purification of terms like “freedom” and “security,” Jordan’s post-Nicaragua poems and essays joined her earlier work’s critique of official state language with her new research on the hemispheric counterinsurgency that ranged from police violence in Brooklyn to contra warfare outside of Managua. This paper argues that at the precise moment Black women writers envisioned literature as an unbounded form for radical internationalism, their work was cycled into spectacles of domestic confrontation: battles limited both to national politics and to heterosexual relations in the home space. This domestication of Black women’s writing provided the terms for its success in mainstream literature and criticism. Reading Jordan’s Nicaragua archive in the context of a Reagan-era internationalism that grounded the work of writers like Jordan, Ntozake Shange, and Pat Parker, I call for a purification of the intellectual and political terms of contemporary Black feminist criticism.

This talk is part of the speaker series titled “New Directions in Black Feminist Studies” and will be this year’s Peggy Pascoe Memorial Lecture for Ethnic Studies.

The series brings four black feminist scholars to campus to talk about their work.

For the most up to date details on this speaker series visit the event website: https://blackfeministspeakerseries.wordpress.com/

Sponsors: Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Law School, Center for the Study of Women in Society, Department of English, College of Arts and Sciences, Oregon Humanities Center, Ethnic Studies, Office of the President.