Audre Lorde, (post)colonial hauntings of socialist archive and the “emancipated” women write back

This paper engages with Audre Lorde’s journal entry, ‘Notes from a Trip to Russia’, as a framework for locating haunting hegemonic feminist imaginaries fed by the narratives of state-managed socialism. Despite being exposed to what Soviet officials wanted Lorde to see in 1976, this paper argues that Lorde nevertheless engaged in a feminist act of questioning the violence of omitted narratives. As a counter-narrative to the ‘curated visibility’ to which Lorde was subjected, the article engages with two memoirs from the family archive that broadly reflect on the Soviet period – one by a local woman and another by a woman who was sent to the USSR’s southmost point in the 1940s. Through postcolonial critique, the article centres the family archive as a site of resistance to hegemonic narratives and the spectral afterlives of Soviet modernity. It argues that by looking beyond institutionalized archive in search of marginalized stories and by seeking alternative reading practices, we choose different ways of living with the past and its ghosts, rewriting the colonial epistemologies of hegemonic feminist narratives, the project that Lorde tasked herself with.