Essays

With a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time.

The second work in Belladonna* Collaborative’s Germinal Texts series, Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun is a book of twenty-six interlocking “essays with characters” that explores the mid-2000s financial “crisis” through the movements and daily lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters located in the Bay Area.

In Positions, Hejinian plays the bricoleur, bringing together whatever’s needed in her to approach to the subject—whether the paratactic tactics of poetry, scholarship’s critical patchwork, or dramatis personae set in time that evokes but frustrates narrative.

Earlier iterations of essays 4, 14, and 17 appeared in Belladonna*’s Elders Series #5, edited by Jennifer Scappettone with work by Etel Adnan, Lyn Hejinian, and Jennifer Scappettone.

Mettant au travail un concept esquissé par la théoricienne Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (qui opère la distinction entre lecture paranoïaque et lecture réparatrice, cette dernière refusant de séparer le blanc des faits du jaune de l’imagination), ce livre se soutient d’une conviction : lorsqu’elle entend partir de la non-effectivité sexe-genre pour libérer, non seulement notre manière d’envisager les identités sexuelles, mais bien la façon de penser le monde, la théorie queer communique avec de multiples avancées parallèles qui, dans les sciences sociales et la philosophie contemporaines, entendent de même se frayer un chemin à travers les clivages et les dualismes entre nature et culture, corps et esprit, monde imaginaire et monde réel, individu et communauté.

Black Hyperbox comes forth as a place that holds incompatible conceptual zones and spatiotemporalities together: Old World and New World, theater and jungle, jaguars and AI, prehistory and futurism, the earthly home and the alien space, Mecca and the North Pole, spaceships lost in cosmos and the politics of Isis, Malevich’s black square and the moon travel, thought and hallucination.

Edited by Alice Brooke, Giulia Smith & Rózsa Farkas