Training Anger with Accuracy: Audre Lorde's Invitation to Black Women

Abstract:The article engages the work of Audre Lorde on rage between Black women. Focusing on her 1984 essay "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger," the article explores destructive rage and Lorde's concern about the effect of this rage on Black women's capacity to build community together and feminist politics more broadly. Adopting an affective reading of Lorde's analysis, the article dissects her attention to the affect of rage as interwoven with other affective registers that include hate and pain. Lorde's insight and politics highlights a dimension of rage that is important to consider in contemporary Black women's feminist politics and organizing—the capacity for rage to destroy sisterhood and authentic healing. Her project of attending to such rage as a means to render it less powerful in effect remains an urgent one for us today.