Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Paperback – August 1, 2007 by Audre Lorde

Description

Author: Lorde Audre

Brand: Crossing Press

Color: Multicolor

Edition: Reprint

Features:

• Crossing Press

Package Dimensions: 17x228x259

Number Of Pages: 192

Release Date: 01-08-2007

Details: Product Description
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature.

“[Lorde’s] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware.”—The New York Times

In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde’s philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.

These landmark writings are, in Lorde’s own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . ”
Review
“An eye-opener”—
Publishers Weekly“[
Sister Outsider is] another indication of the depth of analysis that black women writers are contributing to feminist thought.”
—Barbara Christian, PhD, author of Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers
From the Publisher
* The classic collection of 15 essays and speeches by the prominent black lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde, reissued with a new foreword by Cheryl Clarke. * Required reading in many cultural theory, literary criticism, gay/lesbian studies, and women’s studies programs at universities. * Includes landmark essays such as “Uses of the Erotic” and “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and a seminal dialogue between Lorde and poet Adrienne Rich.
About the Author
A writer, activist, and mother of two,
Audre Lorde grew up in 1930s Harlem. She earned a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University, received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for poetry, and was New York State’s Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993. She is the author of twelve books, including
Zami and
The Black Unicorn. Lorde died of cancer at the age of fifty-eight in 1992.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving

Racism:
The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.
Sexism:
The belief in the inherent superiority of one sex and thereby the right to dominance.
Heterosexism:
The belief in the inherentsuperiority of one pat, tern of lovingand thereby its right to dominance.
Homophobia:
The fear of feelings of love for members of one’s own sexand therefore the hatred of those feelings in others.

THEABOVE FORMS of human blindness stem from the same root – an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals.

To a large degree, at least verbally, the Black community has moved beyond the “two steps behind her man” concept of sexual relations sometimes mouthed as desirable during the sixties. This was a time when the myth of the Black matriarchy as a social disease was being presented by racist forces to redirect our attentions away from the real sources of Black oppression.

For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others – for their use and to our detriment. The development of self-defined Black women, ready to explore and pursue our power and interests within our communities, is a vital component in the war for Black liberation. The image of the Angolan woman with a baby on one arm and a gun in the other is neither romantic nor fanciful. When Black women in this country corne together to examine our sources of strength and support, and to r