Poetics, Politics, and Praxis: Rereading Audre Lorde and Julia de Burgos

In this rereading of the two women third-world poets?-the Puerto-Rican feminist-anticolonial poet Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) and the African-American lesbian-feminist poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992)--Melissa Hussain explores the dialectic between the political-economic and the cultural in the site of poetic production. She attempts to understand poetry as praxis by undertaking a Marxist-feminist-postcolonial rereading of these two poets whose works, she argues, are crucial to understanding the current local and global conditions and configurations of imperialism, (neo)colonialism, capitalism, racism and patriarchy, and oppositional cultural politics that seek to challenge and even change those conditions and configurations. The oeuvre of these two poets serves as an example of how poetry rises above the level of mere aesthetic playfulness and turns out to be a material force, to the point of becoming a praxis. Both Julia de Burgos and Audre Lorde fashion an antiracist, anticolonial, feminist, and anticapitalist poetics of cultural resistance?-in not only their writings, but also their personal involvement in actually existing struggles in which their writings are organically rooted.