Returning to the Archive: Audre Lorde’s Berlin Dialogues and the Ethics of Black Feminist Reengagement
This article examines the Audre Lorde Archive at Freie Universität Berlin as a site for rethinking the reception, citation, and teaching of Black feminist thought in American Studies. I argue that Lorde’s work has often been subject to what I call ‘intellectual truncation’: the reduction of a thinke...
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| Опубликовано в: : | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas, |
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| Главный автор: | |
| Формат: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Язык: | Anglais |
| Опубликовано: |
European journal of American studies
2026
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| Предметы: | |
| Online-ссылка: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Итог: | This article examines the Audre Lorde Archive at Freie Universität Berlin as a site for rethinking the reception, citation, and teaching of Black feminist thought in American Studies. I argue that Lorde’s work has often been subject to what I call ‘intellectual truncation’: the reduction of a thinker’s larger body of work to a small set of repeatable phrases, teachable excerpts, or institutionally convenient texts. Drawing on Lorde’s 1984 classroom recordings at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (JFKI), this article shows how the Berlin archive expands our understanding of Lorde as a theorist of survival, feeling, Black feminism, whiteness, and transnational pedagogy. The recordings capture Lorde teaching Black women’s poetry to largely white German and European students, asking them to consider what the encounter with Black feminist writing demands of them. Through these classroom exchanges, Lorde develops a pedagogical method in which feeling becomes an epistemic starting point, survival becomes relational, and poetry becomes a practice of consciousness alteration. I contend that returning to the archive is not merely an act of recovery, but a Black feminist method of reengagement: one that resists citation as symbolic inclusion and asks scholars to read Lorde’s work in its full intellectual, archival, and transnational complexity. |
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