“For Those of Us Who Live at the Shoreline”: Rearticulating Social Value and Feminist Relation in the Poetics of Audre Lorde and Joy Harjo

Abstract This article analyzes the poetics of Audre Lorde and Joy Harjo as responsive to settler-colonial racial capitalism, seeking to revitalize questions of national incorporation and, more particularly, interethnic belonging. Lorde’s “Coal” (1976) and “A Litany for Survival” (1978) and Harjo’s “Fire” (1979) and “Anchorage” (1983) are read from a Black studies perspective informed by Indigenous critique. Reading between fields allows for new interrogations of circulated value as recognition is taken up between institutions, the state, and communities with sociocultural autonomy. While ethnic studies scholarship has considered colonial-era dynamics of enslavement and land dispossession, this study asks how such histories of dispossession shape the North American contemporary, particularly regarding aesthetic production and interpretation. How do we see Black and Indigenous poets narrating a process both of becoming and surviving as something other than the reified Western Man? Furthermore, how do we see these poets putting into language the fleshly quality of race and Indigeneity as embodied political concepts? If, in North America, race and Indigeneity mutually contribute to structured hierarchies of political life, reading these poets together contributes to a critical feminist discourse of porosity. This analysis of porosity is responsive to Tiffany Lethabo King’s scholarship on Black erotics; porosity, rendered via poetics, presents subjective knowledge formation as embodied and relational. Reading Lorde and Harjo in this context illuminates the various routes social recuperation might take and how communities pursuing emancipatory politics might turn toward each other rather than appealing to settler-colonial formations as the sole arbitrator of repair.