Remembering we were never meant to survive…:¹ Honouring Audre Lorde and the promise of Black women’s survival

Abstract

The article is meant to be a discursive libationary tribute to Audre Lorde’s theorizing on Black women’s survival. An example of Taliaferro-Baszile’s critical race/feminist currere and Pinar’s curriculum as complicated conversation, the article brings together Lorde’s voice with those of other Black women to analyze my past, present, and future. I begin with Lorde’s voice, citing her work as a beginning place for each new idea. This citational praxis represents the libationary call, her thought anchored in the ancestral plane that connects past to present. I place Lorde’s words alongside my own and other Black women scholars’ as a kind of response, an answer to and expression of gratitude for Lorde’s legacy. This call-and-response loop becomes a dialogic libation honouring Black women’s survival.

Keywords:

• Critical race/feminist currere
• currere
• curriculum as complicated conversation
• Audre Lorde
• critical race studies
• Black feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This is the last line of Lorde’s (1978/2020) poem “A Litany for Survival.”