Abstract Audre Lorde (1934–1992), a renowned figure in the American Black feminist canon, shaped feminist and antiracist struggles globally, including those in Europe. Drawing on Piro Rexhepi’s framing of the Balkans as a white enclosure marked by European colorblindness, non-aligned racial innocence, and semi-peripheral “desire for the West,” I use content-based digital ethnography to examine Lorde’s presence in Serbian feminist production since the 2000s. The results show that while Lorde’s figure circulates, the engagement with her work stays mainly quotational, decontextualized, and stripped of racial specificity. Relying on critical theory of blackness, especially the work of Hortense Spillers and Afropessimist thought of Frank B. Wilderson III, I argue that Lorde in Serbia does not escape the American race grammar. The symbolic use of her work signals antiracist virtue, allowing the wounded semi-peripheral white subject proximity to global liberal whiteness. At the same time, Lorde’s blackness anchored in American geopolitical dominance remains canonical, while local Roma mahala-blackness stays unacknowledged, if not impossible.
Jelena Savić (Wed,) studied this question.