Affective Terror, Affective Insurgency: Audre Lorde, Anti-Blackness, and the Empire of Police Violence

In this essay, I examine the affective contours of Audre Lorde’s poetic meditations on police violence. Lorde wrote poems about the police murder of a young Black boy, Clifford Glover, over a five-year period. Her poems offer us a theory of affect that comes from the Black radical tradition and Black lesbian feminism more specifically. She deftly maneuvers between terror and insurgency and highlights how to navigate the unspeakable and unthinkable within an anti-Black state. I argue that Lorde’s poetry offers us an affective politics central to any struggle that seeks to end our intolerable present.