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Abstract
Most people know June Jordan the poet, the activist, the political essayist, and perhaps even the fiction writer. Fewer perhaps know her as an architect, urban planner, Black ecofeminist, and spatial theorist. This essay uses Jordan’s theories of place as a framework for her autobiographical writing, turning primarily to Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), a compilation of essays, letters, lectures, scenarios, diary entries, and reportage. An interdisciplinary approach that incorporates Black feminist autobiography scholarship, trauma and affect theory, and queer theory uncovers Civil Wars as both an autobiography of feeling and an archive of intellectual development. Jordan’s theory of place in Civil Wars functions as an architectural aesthetic that facilitates affective mapping—the movement of feeling between the self and the collective. Affective mapping allows Jordan to narrate a relational self by drawing on Black feelings that emerge within the intimacy of place and in the frequencies of Black sound.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who read this essay with care and thoughtfulness, and offered indispensable suggestions for improvement.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This essay was supported by a grant from the National Humanities Center.
Notes
1 Meyer, “An Elegy of Place.”
2 I am grateful to Christina Sharpe for this insight on elegy as an architecture.
3 Critical attention to Jordan’s environmental justice and urban-planning work includes Fish, “Place”; Gumbs, “This Instant” and “Nobody Mean More”; Davis, “Black Spaces Matter” ; Matlin, “‘A New Reality’”; Shockley, “On Seeing”; and Alston, “‘Moving Towards Home.’”
4 Davis, “Black Spaces Matter,” 3.
5 Fish, “Place,” 331.
6 Jordan, Civil Wars, xi.
7 Ibid, xiii.
8 Ibid., xiv.
9 Autobiography criticism that theorizes the relational self includes Ards, Words of Witness; Perkins, Autobiography as Activism; Stanford-Friedman, “Women’s Autobiographical Selves”; Eakin, How Our Lives.
10 Perkins, Autobiography as Activism, 14.
11 Jordan, Civil Wars, 125.
12 Ibid., 126.
13 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 682.
14 Ards, Words of Witness, 16.
15 Nash, “Practicing Love,” 4.
16 See, for example, Muñoz, Disidentifications; Cheng, The Melancholy of Race; Cvetkovich, Depression; Eng and Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation.
17 Flatley, Affective Mapping, 3.
18 Eng and Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, 78.
19 Bambara, “Chosen Weapons,” 41.
20 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 7.
21 Jordan, Civil Wars, 143.
22 Ibid., 28.
23 Ibid., xxv.
24 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 680.
25 Clay Felkner of the New York Herald Tribune had tasked Jordan to gauge and write about the “mood” in Harlem in order to determine if it would be “a long hot summer.” She correctly assessed the mood as rage. Felkner declined to publish her piece. See Jordan, Civil Wars, 17; Correspondence with Clay Felkner, June Jordan Papers, MC 513, Box 61, Folder 23, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
26 Jordan, Civil Wars, 16.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 23.
30 Gumbs, “This Instant,” 2.
31 Jordan, Civil Wars, 23.
32 Gumbs, “This Instant,” 4.
33 See Barlow, Looking Up at Down.
34 Jordan, Civil Wars, xiii.
35 Campt, Listening to Images, 35.
36 In the poem “Moving Towards Home,” Jordan uses the intimate scale of the “living room” to forge an affective political community between Black Americans and Palestinians. Her conceptualization of living room supports her larger ethical position on the importance of architectural design for human life. See Jordan, Living Room, 132.
37 Qtd. in Fish, “Place,” 331.
38 Meyer, “Instant Slum Clearance,” 111.
39 Jordan, Civil Wars, 25.
40 The catchphrase “Urban renewal is Negro removal” was common in the 1960s. Some attribute its origin to James Baldwin, who used the phrase in a television interview with Dr Kenneth Clark. See Standley and Pratt, Conversations with James Baldwin.
41 Jordan, Civil Wars, 24.
42 Meyer, “Instant Slum Clearance,” 111.
43 Matlin, “‘A New Reality,’” 1003. Jordan’s abolitionist perspective echoes Baldwin’s claim in “Fifth Avenue, Uptown” that “A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.” See The Price of theTicket, 217. See also Harrington, “Tear Down the Ghetto” and Harris, “Races Agree.”
44 For more on these geographic continuities from the plantation to the ghetto, see Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments; McKittrick, “Plantation Futures.”
45 See Hurley, Infrastructures of Apocalypse; especially her introduction, “End Times.”
46 Meyer, “Instant Slum Clearance,” 109.
47 Ards, Words of Witness, 100.
48 Jordan, Things, 25.
49 Jordan gave this talk as part of a Reid Lectureship that she was co-awarded with Alice Walker.
50 Jordan, Civil Wars, 100.
51 Their collected works were published in Jordan and Bush, The Voice.
52 Jordan, Civil Wars, 55.
53 Ibid., 101.
54 Ibid., 96.
55 Lordi, Black Resonance, 188.
56 Ibid., 192.
57 Jordan, Civil Wars, 96.
58 Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” Collected Poems, 255.
59 Lordi, Black Resonance, 189.
60 Jordan, Civil Wars, 98.
61 Ibid., 97.
62 Ibid., 101.
63 Ibid., 102.
64 Walker’s essay is also about how she came to know her mother through the search for Black women’s artistic dreams and often stifled aspirations. See In Search. Cheryl Wall notes that Jordan was in the audience when Walker read the essay. See On Freedom.
65 Brown, “Furia,” 496.
66 Jordan, Things, 28.
67 Ibid., 37.
68 Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement,” 278.
69 Jordan, Civil Wars, 102.
70 Ibid. My reference to the kitchen as a “wordshop” comes from Marshall, Reena and Other Stories, 12.
71 Jordan, Civil Wars, 40.
72 Ibid., 142.
73 Nash, “Practicing Love,” 19.
74 Both Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway attended Howard University.
75 Werner, A Change, 193.
76 Jordan, Civil Wars, 143.
77 Sharpe, In the Wake.
78 Jordan, Civil Wars, 145.
79 Ibid., 146.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jennifer D. Williams
Jennifer D. Williams is an Assistant Professor of English at Howard University in Washington, DC. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, particularly in relation to space, race, and class. Dr. Williams is completing a book on Black women’s literature and urban segregation. You can find her other publications in The Black Scholar, Meridians, and Contemporary Women’s Writing, among other places.