Conversation & Lecture

Using and Abusing ‘The Master’s Tools’

Tue, Aug 26, 2025

6:00 PM–8:00 PM

This hybrid event will take place in person in the English Lounge (Room 4406), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC, and online via Zoom.

Audre Lorde named New York State Poet Laureate by Governor Mario Cuomo, 1991.

Thanks to everyone who gathered to attend in this conversation to discuss Audre Lorde’s poetics and political philosophy. Enjoy the video of this event as well as photos and slides below:

Audre Lorde’s statement that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” stands for uncompromising vision in the fight for social change. At the same time, those with more optimism about the critical potential of inherited tools—academic disciplines, legal and political instruments, etc.—dismiss her words as hyperbole. In both cases, Lorde’s words are too often invoked with little attention to her commitments or her actual work. With a deeper interpretation of Lorde’s political philosophy, we can ask: What makes a tool the master’s? And what does dismantling his house actually demand? Join visiting scholar Caleb Ward from the University of Hamburg in Germany and author of The Unflinching Philosophy of Audre Lorde (2026), for this discussion of Lorde’s poetics and political philosophy, moderated by Ju Ly Ban, Lost & Found Archival Research Fellow and PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Gradaute Center.

This event is organized by Ju Ly Ban as part of the CUNY Graduate English Program Friday Forum series, co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center.

About the Participants

Lecturer: Caleb Ward is a postdoc in Philosophy at University of Hamburg in Germany. His book The Unflinching Philosophy of Audre Lorde is forthcoming in 2026.

Moderator: Ju Ly Ban is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and an Archival Research Fellow with Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. Her research focuses on the archives of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in conversation with Black queer feminist practice.