Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Celestial Bodies
- Part I Extraction and Abstraction
- Part II Black Optics
- Part III Quare Bodies
- 13 Body of Knowledge
- 14 The Black Body, Violence, and Religion
- 15 Black Cripistemologies
- 16 Black Erotic Bodies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
13 - Body of Knowledge
Audre Lorde’s Zami
from Part III - Quare Bodies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Celestial Bodies
- Part I Extraction and Abstraction
- Part II Black Optics
- Part III Quare Bodies
- 13 Body of Knowledge
- 14 The Black Body, Violence, and Religion
- 15 Black Cripistemologies
- 16 Black Erotic Bodies
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
The Black lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde published two full-length pieces of life-writing: The Cancer Journals in 1980, and the biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in 1982. These works, as well as Lorde’s poetry and essays, share the use of embodiment as a source of literary knowledge production. Audre Lorde’s writing locates her embodied experience as a center from which feeling and the narrative accounting for that feeling emanates. Her literary work gestures to a sense of her body as integral for feeling and therefore knowing. The interrelation of feeling and knowing is a key theme within Zami, and reiterates through twentieth and twenty-first century Black queer writing. This chapter provides background on Lorde as a writer, situates Zami alongside Lorde’s other texts, and illustrates some of the narrative moments in Zami which illustrate its use of embodiment in relation to literary knowledge.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Black Body in American Literature , pp. 191 - 203Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024