Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic 9780814789360

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Difficult Diasporas

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Difficult Diasporas The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic

samantha pinto

a New York University Press new york and london

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2013 by New York University. All rights reserved L i b r a ry o f C o n g r e s s C ata l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c at i o n Data

Pinto, Samantha. Difficult diasporas : the transnational feminist aesthetic of the Black Atlantic / Samantha Pinto. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8147-5948-6 (cl : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8147-7009-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Feminism—Africa. 2. African diaspora. 3. African American women authors. 4. African American women—Intellectual life. I. Title. HQ1787.P56 2013 305.42096—dc23 2013005250 References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Feminist Disorder of Diaspora 1 2

3 4 5

6

vii 1

The World and the “Jar”: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora

18

It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body

44

The Drama of Dislocation: Staging Diaspora History in the Work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo

77

Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity

106

Intimate Migrations: Narrating “Third World Women” in the Short Fiction of Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and Pauline Melville

142

Impossible Objects: M. NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, and the Diaspora Feminist Aesthetics of Accumulation

175

Coda: The Risks of Reading

201

Notes

209

References

233

Index

265

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Acknowledgments

I feel like I have had such a charmed intellectual existence that I do not know where to begin expressing gratitude for the writing of this book. I suppose a sort of intellectual history would organize it as well as any: At Rutgers, I had the good fortune of stumbling into classes with some of the smartest, most generous professors and peers I have found since: Courtney Marshall, Beth Hutchison, Marianne DeKoven, and Elin Diamond put in countless hours working with me. Brent Edwards continues to astound me with his willingness to gracefully transition from my undergraduate mentor to my full-fledged colleague in the field. I would not have put together my “weird” texts with diaspora and feminist theory without him. At UCLA, so many people took a critical interest in the early stages of this project, even when they had no vested interest in its—and my— success: Joseph Bristow, Rafael Perez-Torres, Ali Behdad, Arthur Little, Caroline Streeter, and Helen Deutsch, to name a few of my faculty interlocutors. Thanks also go to the English Department for their generous support throughout my tenure at UCLA, as well as to Signs journal. Richard Yarborough, Françoise Lionnet, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, and Harryette Mullen logged significant time talking me through my dissertation and combing through my writing. Yogita Goyal gave up precious junior faculty hours working with me on every last draft and continues to do so to this very day. Only after I was slogging through research, teaching, and meetings at my own job did I realize what she gave up to help my project take shape, all the while producing amazing scholarship.

viii / acknowledgments

She is the sole reason that I got an education in African literature. And Jenny Sharpe was the adviser to end all advisers; she meted out tough love when it was called for (especially on my writing!) and buoyed me with just the right words when I needed to push through to finish. Her pragmatism and theoretical savvy are unparalleled; I am so lucky to have worked with her on this book. Meg Lamont and Loren Blinde suffered through an early writing group with me. Lisa Hills, Kathleen Washburn, Wendy Belcher, Keidra Morris, and Elizabeth Graham accompanied me on many walks and hikes while I worked through early versions of my chapters. Joyce Lee and Melanie Ho always made sure I was well fed, as did Phil Fibiger. Ally Hamilton kept me sane. La’Tonya Rease Miles kept me sharp and kept me laughing, as did the antics of my LA family, Rob, Jabari, Zoe, and Gloria. Sam See remains one of the most important intellectual partners in my life. Denise Cruz continues to be my much-smarter sounding board for every piece of writing I produce and a beacon of sanity, humor, professionalism, and cookies. This book would not be here without her, though she is not at fault for its flaws. Emily Russell is my academic and personal rock, putting up with way more crazy, upset phone calls and visits than anyone should. Her eminently reasonable advice belies her unbelievably acute intellect and incredibly warm friendship for over a decade. She and Phil cook up a mean short rib, to boot. At Georgetown, I would be hard-pressed to find a faculty or staff member whom I could leave off of my thank-you list. Penn Szittya, Jason Rosenblatt, and Kathy Temple have been the most supportive chairs a junior faculty could imagine while writing this book. Donna Even-Kesef and Karen Lautman have kept this whole operation afloat, administratively. The English Department, Georgetown University, and The Graduate School have supported me in every endeavor to finish this book. Special thanks goes to the Lafferty family for a semester leave at a crucial time for the project. The African Studies Program has given me the invaluable company of fellow Africanists and the support of Scott Taylor and Lahra Smith. The Women’s and Gender Studies Program has been an interdisciplinary home for workshopping early drafts of one chapter. Henry Schwarz, Lori Merish, Dana Luciano, Patrick O’Malley, Lindsay Kaplan, Jennifer Fink, Lyndon Dominique, Sarah McNamer, and Louise Bernard have read drafts, laughed over drinks, given advice, and commiserated with me too many times to count. Matthew Tinkcom has done all of the above, again and again; he is the hostess with the mostess. I miss Michael Ragussis’s wit and compassion every day. Caetlin Benson-Allot and Mimi Yiu are the

acknowledgments / ix

most fantastic writing group partners you could ask for—with or without the presence of delicious baked goods! Ricardo Ortiz has been a mentor, a friend, a conference organizer extraordinaire, an invaluable colleague, a savvy reader, and a wonderful dinner companion from the very start. Pam Fox has never been too busy to give me copious notes, to try to protect me from my own inability to say no to service, to talk through the finer points and frustrations of feminism with me, or to invite me to spend time with her wonderful family. It is not enough to just say thank you to her, Mark, Ana, and Jackie, but it will at least repay a small bit of what I owe them for their generosity and friendship. Thanks to the Harry Ransom Center, particularly to Molly Schwartzburg and Gabby Redwine, my chapter on Adrienne Kennedy is that much stronger, and I have got many future texts to study. The University of Texas at Austin gave me invaluable leave time in the home stretch of manuscript revisions. The African and African Studies Department was the ideal interdisciplinary home in this late stage. I would not have been there without Ted Gordon, Frank Guridy, and, especially, the selfless generosity of Eric Tang. Omi Jones, Jennifer Wilks, and Neville Hoad eagerly talked shop with me about this project. Meta Jones read my work with a level of detail I only wish I could return, with a depth of knowledge about poetics that I can only approximate. Tatiana Kuzmic and Judy Coffin listened to my angst about the book regularly. Many other friends kept me singing karaoke, going to yoga, and eating cheesecake like the Golden Girls in the last year of this book. Julia Lee was my Austin guide, my NYU pioneer, and my dog park buddy; she made my Austin time possible, and impossibly fun. And just to prove how generous the academy can be sometimes, I have to thank colleagues at totally unrelated institutions who helped me refine this book. The DC Queers reading group has, in so many ways, been my greater DC intellectual home. Holly Dugan has read drafts of chapters and met me for cupcakes so many times. Yolanda Padilla, Shane Vogel, and Kandice Chuh have given me invaluable comments on parts of this book, as has Sangeeta Ray, whose frank and exuberant advice is always on point. And many thanks go to my NYU and ALI colleagues Eric Zinner, Ciara McLaughlin, Alicia Nadkarni, Tim Roberts, and Andrew Katz for their perseverance and patience, as well as to my anonymous readers for their thoughtful, honest, and kind readings of my work. It is a far better project because of their input. I am deeply grateful to the authors and publishers who generously allowed me to use their work in the following pages. They have given

x / acknowledgments

permission to use extended quotations from the following copyrighted works: Erica Hunt, “The Order of the Story,” in Local History (New York: Roof Books, 1993); Jackie Kay, “The Red Graveyard,” in Bessie Smith (Bath, UK: Absolute, 1997), reprinted in Darling: New & Selected Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2007); Honor Ford-Smith, “A Message from Ni,” in My Mother’s Last Dance (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1996); Elizabeth Alexander, “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” and “Today’s News,” in The Venus Hottentot (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1990); Deborah Richards, “The Beauty Projection” and “C’est L’Amour: That’s Love,” in Last One Out (Honolulu: subpress, 2003); Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse, 1995), reprinted in Recyclopedia (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2006); M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown, Canada: Ragweed, 1989). Sections of chapter 1 are reprinted from “The World & the Jar: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Futures of the Black Diaspora,” Atlantic Studies 7 (3) (2010): 263–84. Sections of chapter 4 are reprinted from “Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity,” in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, ed. Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). My family has supported me in every possible sense of the term since I sat around obsessively reading Jane Eyre in my youth. How can I adequately thank my mom, Joyce, and dad, Nick, for those many years of reading to me, debating everything, and helping me through my very long education? Jeff, Alex, Eileen, Jackie, the Steppies (Maureen, Caitlin, Patrick, Anthony), Mary, and Nicole always showed up when I needed them most—for phone calls, medical diagnoses, or a good laugh. Lola, Chester, and Leroy, in their adorable canineness, kept me human through this entire process. There are not enough treats in the world to make up for how neglectful I have been at times—they are very patient puppies. Lastly, how do you thank someone who lives with you while you live with the book, day after day after years? Sean Williams put up with me at the darkest of times, when it seemed I would never change out of my yoga pants and see nonfluorescent lighting again. He brought me tacos and took the dogs to the park and stayed up with me while I added one more cite to the bibliography. He made me not think about work for a precious few hours of the day and gave me everything to look forward to when I was in the middle of working. I had no right to be so happy while finishing a book.

Introduction: The Feminist Disorder of Diaspora

There is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language; nothing that more insistently requires that one allow oneself to be carried along by the proliferation of qualities and forms. —michel foucault, The Order of Things The new order didn’t affect only poetry. It also affected history, sociology, and philosophy. West Indian society was not studied per se, as an autonomous object. . . . West Indian society came to be considered as a Paradise perverted by Europe. Everything prior to colonization was idealized. Consequently, from the image of Africa, the motherland, were carefully eradicated any blemishes such as domestic slavery, or tribal warfare, and the subjugation of women. —maryse condé, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer”

In the 1924 hit “Freight Train Blues,” Trixie Smith outlines an early feminist critique of diaspora, singing, “When a woman gets the blues, she goes to her room and hides / When a woman gets the blues, she goes to her room and hides / But when a man gets the blues, he catch a freight train and rides.” Smith’s standard blues lyric inhabits what has become the black genre par excellence for the twentieth century, the blues. The paradigm of racial aesthetics, the blues represent African American suffering and histories of both physically forced and economically coerced transience, as well as the forceful originality of these historic standpoints in expressive culture. As such, the blues as a form often signify racial authenticity. Ironically, the blues are also the benchmark of black commodification and appropriation by white America and beyond in critical discussions of distribution, marketing, and circulation. Thus, the blues themselves are a complicated Foucauldian order of things—a quality and form that challenges some

2 / introduction

dominant power structures, is complicit with others, and establishes structures of meaning of its own. The blues are representative, as a genre, of both aesthetic highs and historical lows, stories of exceptional commercial and artistic success in form and normative suffering in content, in the same generic template. Smith’s lyric engages these orders, laying bare the structure of the blues, which is deeply centered around romantic, heterosexual narratives of love and loss, and of its means of championing what seems like a deeply gendered set of options for mobility in the face of trauma and conflict. Her lyrics are also a reminder that even as representation in blues songs, like the material reality of working-class black women’s lives, constrained women to the domestic and the private spheres, the blues as a commodified skill set gave black women performers the ability to literally travel, to break the very dichotomy that the song’s lyrics suggests. This contradiction between content, performance, and distribution signals gender as a complicated shift in thinking through received political and critical orders, as Caribbean writer Maryse Condé suggests in the epigraph; yes, the blues tell “migration horror stories,” but they also necessitate a rearrangement of our politics on black artistic commodification and consumption (Davies 1994). The blues as paradigmatic “matrix” for twentieth-century black aesthetics, then, must reckon with the central significance of gender and sexuality to black form, in production, reception, and circulation, as well as in content (H. Baker [1984] 1987). Writing nearly seventy years after Smith, African American experimental poet Erica Hunt1 extends Smith’s aesthetic map of black women’s mobility; “The Order of the Story,” her 1993 prose poem, gives this directive: Imagine yourself walking into a room as the exercise suggests, and then, describe how you fill the doorway, the direction you dress in, the way you walk out of the frame. Imagine finding stones—the inscriptions that predicted you. Invent the language now. Invent the language as if each inflection belonged to you instead of containing you, or treating you as if you were a commotion in the path of progress. (20) Hunt’s poetic charge opaquely suggests that too often black women as subjects and artists are hemmed in by their established, legible frames. Black women writers who deviate from formal and generic convention are particularly hard to place for creative communities because of the

introduction / 3

limited foremothers they are allowed to claim on the innovation front and a difficult reception history in African American studies post–Black Arts.2 This latter history finds experimental artists hard to assimilate into direct reference to race and post–Civil Rights politics of identity. Hunt asks us both to acknowledge the traumatic linguistic order of things that has created these recognizable paradigms of identity politics and to “invent a language” to describe them differently—to disorder those representations of black women. She suggests that difficult subjects (black women as authors/agents/disciplinary formations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) require difficult objects (innovative literary texts) to “represent” and certainly to upend this order. In this formulation, Trixie Smith’s prescient materialist critique within the blues form is generically transformed, reordered to think through black women’s mobility in nearly a century’s worth of linguistic and cultural representation in the Black Atlantic.3 The innovative Black Atlantic women writers who follow Smith and Hunt in this book offer tentative, experimental economies of form and a set of aesthetic practices that flow unevenly across national and geographic borders in the Anglophone diaspora. Difficult Diasporas starts with the generic dislocation of a stable black subject in creative nonfiction in its first chapter and moves on to analyze “concept” poetry collections, creatively staged dramas, book-length prose, short fiction cycles, and epic nonnarrative poems by twentieth- and start-of-the-twenty-first-century writers as geographically and generically diverse as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, Ama Ata Aidoo, Adrienne Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, Pauline Melville, Harryette Mullen, and M. NourbeSe Philip. These texts and authors, while innovative, also examine and include popular modes of signifying race and gender, turning the popular and the familiar into strange and difficult reworkings of a recognizable frame. They occupy and renegotiate the order of diaspora laid out in the two texts introduced earlier. Reading this archive provides us a politics of representation distinctly poised to offer something other than the teleology of narrative form in its displacement of the novel and of mimetic realism. A critical engagement with aesthetics, as not just a form but the form of politics,4 moves us into the systemic analysis of how gender and race operate—for better and for worse—through form and through the complex relationship between language and the order(s) of diaspora. Together, these neglected texts begin to map the territory of “difficult diasporas,” the aesthetic and critical terrains that imagine the feminist

4 / introduction

potential for occupying diaspora’s very form itself, the transgressive and often unexpected loops of circulation that cannot easily be traced to fixed points of origin and return. In Condé’s use of the term, to “disorder” is to expose the gendered limitations of black migration and to imagine new routes of representation such as those of the writers studied in this book.5 I map correspondences between seemingly incongruous times and places through the innovative aesthetic platforms created by Black Atlantic women writers. Rather than travel’s focus on a definitive “to” and “from,” these textual moments of aesthetic alliance across axes of difference offer a methodological vision of diaspora studies. Diaspora becomes not only a set of physical movements, then, but also a set of aesthetic and interpretive strategies.6 The writers found on the pages that follow—whether it is Zoë Wicomb critiquing the “real world school” or Deborah Richards embracing the failure of “trying to include everything”—articulate their own critical interventions into making black women’s innovative writing speak past the boundaries of social realism and other conservative readings of the black aesthetic.7 The aesthetics of innovative form makes a pact with its readers and critics, requiring the aforementioned intense engagement. This intensity acknowledges reading as difficult work, affectively and politically, that can push us into questioning what we think of as politically progressive under the name of race and gender studies.8 In bringing the full weight of diaspora to bear on what and how we read for the intersections of difference, these innovative texts insist on the incommensurability of various registers of identity, weighing the “risk and safety” of feminist and ethnic studies’ political boundaries (Morrison 1993, xi). “Difficulty” then operates here in a multivalent sense. First, I use “difficulty” to signify the intense engagement that reading opaque, formally experimental texts requires of the modern reader.9 This challenging literacy recasts the constellation of terms that theorists associated with transnational, postcolonial, and diaspora studies have coined to describe similarly intense, ethical relations across various axes of difference: “contact” (Pratt), “affiliation” (Said), “translation” (Edwards), “poetics of relation”/“cross-cultural poetics” (Glissant), “encounter” (Friedman), to name a few.10 Difficulty is a way to group these relational terms regarding conflict and community together and to think about how that may relate to bodies of literature, rather than just to the bodies represented in literature. Literary and cultural production are, as this book argues, intimately and pervasively present in how we construct analytics of race, gender, and location, in that they invoke and provoke contradictory

introduction / 5

desires to have the known world reflected but also to create new and varied connections. The feminist aesthetics of the writers studied in this book scramble the seemingly obvious knowability—“at once radically other and viscerally knowable,” as critic Madhu Dubey succinctly says of perceptions of African American racial identity (2003, 9)—of these cultural and generic orders of signification. In doing so, they forward a technique of reading difference (and reading differently) rather than representing it as a feminist practice of diaspora studies. Difficult Diasporas reveals the order of representation that animates critical categories of cultural analysis such as that of “The Black Atlantic,” “transnational feminism,” or “diaspora” itself. In fact, its new aesthetic genealogies reimagine diaspora as a site of disorder through its very proliferation of forms.11 The form of the novel has dominated discussions of Anglophone diaspora literature,12 with a footnoted strain on narrative cinema. Direct representation to corresponding bodies and locations has taken precedence and has shaped our reading practices—our theoretical formations of what the world does, could, and should look like—in unconscious ways that we do not always or often acknowledge. That the narrative form of the novel has been overly privileged in conceptually laying out diaspora literature and that women and gender have been marginal to its interdisciplinary conceptualization are not coincidences, I argue.13 The innovative genealogy of black women’s writing that I trace in this book moves toward the nonnarrative, or texts in which narrative is decentered, undone, and thwarted, and so does not shy away from the failures, traumas, and unfinished business of diaspora flows and gender’s difficult place in those networks. The texts studied in this book recognize the value in bending and mixing genre as essential in critiquing the constraints on black women’s subjectivity across the academy and the diaspora.14 In this sense, Difficult Diasporas makes a claim for the untapped potential of black women’s writing in designing, defining, and disordering diaspora. This book is the first comparative study of black women writers across the Black Atlantic to demonstrate the crucial role of literary aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and diaspora. Thinking across national borders to include African, African American, Afro-Canadian, Caribbean, and Black British literature, I bring together neglected literary resources to offer inventive generic combinations beyond the novel in order to negotiate “diaspora” as a critical feminist category. In Difficult Diasporas, black women’s writing is no longer compartmentalized as an addition, supplement, or appendix to

6 / introduction

male-centered theories of the diaspora, and literary studies is no longer dismissed as ancillary to diaspora as a concept except for narrative plot and historical action. This book thus challenges work that has “assumed the experience of black masculinity as a collective identity” and as the field’s invisible conceptual center, bringing black women’s literature in to transform the very readings and questions we think the field can offer (Gunning, Hunter, and Mitchell 2004, 3). It also stands to challenge the limits of feminist reading and representational practices around race and the transnational, deeply considering how form, structure, and genres of culture make a difference in what we think of as imaginable identities and categories of analysis appropriate to feminist thought. This archive of difficult texts is critical to remapping both feminist and diaspora scholarship today, as well as our relationships to “black women’s writing” as a recognizable category of “creative theorizing” on race and gender (Davies 1994, 44).

The Difficulty of Diaspora Feminism When Trixie Smith offers her succinct outline and implicit critique of the gendering of cultural and geographic mobility, she catches this project’s own mobile formation. Coming up in the academy at the turn of the millennium, I was part of a generation of scholars raised on Paul Gilroy’s formulation of The Black Atlantic, a manifesto to shift the nationalist frame of African American studies in the US academy that became the public site of the field’s revitalization, as well as its globalization. Encountering Gilroy’s model was an exercise in critical desire and alienation— how could I not appreciate the transnational turn that complicated definitions of blackness beyond America’s borders? How, too, could I not notice the near silence on women’s writing and cultural expressions that haunts the text’s new and sweeping conceptualization of the field?15 Following the radical extension of the African American canon to include “lost” authors such as Nella Larson and Jessie Fauset,16 and the vibrant vein of the black feminist thought of Hazel Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, and Valerie Smith, here was a nineteenth- and early twentieth-centurycentered critique that left out women altogether in its focus on the ship as chronotope—a sexless, ineffable Middle Passage on one route and the possibilities of free black masculine labor on the other.17 The critical intervention that endures beyond this lack, for this project, is Gilroy’s focus on the potential of black art and cultural expression to make “race” strange and unfamiliar. The questions of gender,

introduction / 7

race, and aesthetics that center African American experiences of chattel slavery, the great migration, lynching, and Black Power, to name a few flashpoints, shift when looking at histories that also include colonialism, immigration, decolonization, and globalization. Similar dislocations of national identity formations were being staged at the same time in transnational feminist discourse and queer and gender studies. These emergent subfields called not just for a more global focus for feminist inquiry but for questioning “woman” as a sign, rather than women as already constituted, assumed subjects (Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem 1999). In particular, the field asked how gender, race, sexuality, and nation, among other identitarian categories, converged to make meaning out of “black women,” opening up what Gayatri Spivak called for in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1993)—namely, attention to the strategies of representation in both/all of its complexities.18 African and African diaspora feminist theorists, in particular, carefully attended to the material and perceived tensions between “African” and “feminist” as critical categories that mapped uneven relations between the West and the Global South.19 Feminist studies, then, began to coalesce through contradiction rather than recovery, difference rather than consensus. This embrace of difficulty has become Difficult Diaspora’s methodology for orienting race, gender, and diaspora beyond strictly historical and national frameworks and instead through a textuality that can engender and embody these fundamental tensions in the fields of feminist and diaspora studies.20 Diaspora, for this set of texts, is defined by the difficulty of “establishing an order among things”: nothing about diaspora is easy to create, to define, to fix.21 Diaspora demands the specificity of times, places, names, and dates, all the while claiming its multitudes as its major strength, its global significance. The African Diaspora (or its more specifically limited instantiation as “The Black Atlantic”) as a historical phenomenon was formed through radical experimentations in technologies of travel and commerce, including chattel slavery—innovations that built on the political and ethical worlds that preceded them and yet demanded their suspension in configuring new and frequently terrible categories of knowledge around difference. Diaspora, in the formal pathways of this book’s archive, can also challenge the order of things—the way we come to recognize and interpret our specific historical and social realities—in its difficult play between the known and the unknown, between recognizable forms of being, knowing, belonging, and acting in the world and the new forms that emerge as we try to understand its shifts.22

8 / introduction

Diaspora’s possibilities include considering black women’s writing as an act of mobility itself, a necessary reformulation of diaspora subjectivity that undergirds the difficult diasporas I map out here.23 Black women’s writing is “a series of boundary crossings” that is highly variable and contingent, as Carole Boyce Davies (1994, 3) claims, a mobility I map in terms of both genre and national/regional affiliations. I take Davies’s and other Black Atlantic feminist work, such as Sylvia Wynter’s (2001) renegotiation of black women as the center of humanistic inquiry, as a blueprint that pushes the boundaries of representation as the frontier by and through which we recognize and make legible the category of “black women.” Difficult Diasporas seeks out these critiques not through subjects as representations but through representation itself as a subject.24 As such, I try to keep in mind Hazel Carby’s powerful call to counter “the search for or assumption of the existence of a black female language” across texts (1987, 16). My focus on representation, then, is found not always in the obvious mimetic places but in the forms, genres, structures, and rhetorical patterns that express a relationship to various structures of meaning and reading that do not necessarily seem in direct relation to recognizable discourses of race, gender, and/or location.25 This move is one most commonly associated with postmodernism in literary criticism. Postmodernism’s relationship to African American, postcolonial, and women’s writing has been deeply debated on and across all three fields, with critics pointing to the tension between an impossible standard of “realism” and authenticity attached to racial and gendered identities and the unwillingness to cede all aesthetic innovation to a Western-defined style.26 While I see the value in interrogating these “frames of intelligibility” skeptically, as critics from Barbara Christian (2007) to Susan Andrade (2011) have thoughtfully done, I also see the critical need for feminist thinking around gender, and especially women’s literature, to explore alternate modes of representation—not just to reproduce the binaries that the “post-” in so many theoretical lexicons threatens. In the aesthetic tactics studied in this book’s reordering of diaspora, there is decidedly a call to revel in this difficult process, with the possibility of “making representation less of a burden and more of a collective pleasure and responsibility” (Shohat 1998, 9–10).27 These texts published across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries disrupt the organization and management of Black Atlantic women’s social, political, and even erotic attachments that conventional narrative strategies, themselves hybrid constructions of Western and African cultural form, lay claim to in their

introduction / 9

forms. As such, they create a new vision of post–Harlem Renaissance cosmopolitan networks of difficulty that do not rely exclusively on the privilege of travel or even a recognizable literary or political community of production. These innovative texts resist narratives of black identity that emerge as masculine and nationalist but also those that entrench a definitive culture and politics of African diaspora femininity.28 Through aesthetic difference, they generate cultural productions of black women’s subjectivity that acknowledge, in form and in content, contradiction, complexity, and difference.29 Difficult Diasporas argues that our own interpretive strategies must shift not away from form and structure but toward it. The book’s texts are not the naturalized heirs but the carefully and often innovatively constructed gendered responses to histories and patterns of black migration throughout the Black Atlantic. They call attention not just to the geographic limits placed on familiar black subjectivity but also to the aesthetic and disciplinary boundaries that undergird such cognitive systems of understanding race. If, as Paul Gilroy remarks in Postcolonial Melancholia, “the colony acted as a place of governmental experiment and innovation,” innovation should not be unquestionably celebrated (2005, 21). Language, like the postcolonial metropolis, is an ideological practice, one that can succumb to what Caribbean writer and artist Wilson Harris names “the illiteracy of the imagination” (1999, 77).30 The point of innovation, and of the noticeable tension between form and content in the texts studied here, is to reroute and retrain our reading practices and hence the existing order(s) of diaspora.31 In their aesthetic range, these texts break standard reading practices within and across disciplinary categories as well as the category of “black women’s writing” as it is canonized. Diaspora is here recognized and enacted as an “aesthetics of identity,” not just a politics to be narrated (Arana 2007, 2).32 Diaspora can then represent more than direct reference to the Black Atlantic’s elsewheres (Africa, the Caribbean, Black Britain), more than “the sum of the place we find ourselves” (Arana 2007, 3).33 In this book’s geographical spread, it does not then attempt to reinforce the lines of nationalist comparativism. Instead, it looks across diaspora women writers’ form as a way to conceptually expose how “we work very hard to make geography what it is” (McKittrick 2006, xi) in relationship to race and gender.34 This book instead reformulates diaspora through formal innovation—taking its unpredictable routes to imaginative, nonnarrative realization—in order to centralize gender beyond literal travel. Black women’s writing

10 / introduction

innovatively reimagines black women as subjects of diaspora, but it also performs a reconstruction of the possibilities of diaspora studies itself—and its historical coming up in the academy at the intersection of postcolonial, transnational feminist, and Black Atlantic ways of reading difference.35 In this sense, this book takes up Rachel Lee’s call for women of color, broadly defined, to stop “haunting” the center and instead to claim what she calls “territory” in speaking to one another across difference in their aesthetic—and critical—forms (2002, 99). Like Trixie Smith’s song, Difficult Diasporas attempts to make visible and at the same time disorder a genealogy of black cultural production. The exuberant interrogations and displacements of fixed identitarian politics in Black Atlantic women’s formally experimental writing, art, and culture refuse stereotypical readings or affiliations around categories of difference. In unflinchingly reusing “the order of the stor[ies]” being told about and by and in the name of black women, this archive of largely neglected resources remakes the order of diaspora not just to “include” women but to constitutively challenge how we conceive and read for signs of race, gender, and transnational geographies, in literature and beyond its imaginative borders. These formally innovative texts threaten with their abstraction, their sometimes downright refusal to claim race or gender or “black women” in legible ways. Instead, their innovations of language, genre, and form suggest the potential futures of the field as yet unknown, as well as the revision of complicated histories of black women as subjects in and of the academy.

Mapping Black Atlantic Feminist Aesthetics The experimental aesthetics showcased in Difficult Diasporas embody the irrecoverable, unevenly legible presence of the historical in twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of race and gendered belonging—presences that draw from the well of an incredible variety of source material and that find resonances in unexpected, uncomfortable locations. The historical here does not explain as much as it fractures, fails, and/or erupts. Violating the temporality of historical context, the archive of this book also directly challenges the tradition-versus-modernity line that both diaspora and feminist studies has interrogated as not just problematic but the problem central to defining racial, gendered, and globalized difference.36 Innovative reorderings of the materials of blackness in line with “tradition” argue not just for its simultaneity with the modern but for the critical necessity of thinking race, gender, and

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modernity as mutually constitutive phenomena, through the long tail of contact and capital. A large, if subtle, part of the construction of modernity was narrated and justified through gender and sexual difference— and the lingering effects of this undergirding pervade both Black Atlantic and transnational feminist studies in the very form of “women”—black, Third World, Western, and so on—that appear as “the worst victims and the redemptive agents of the postmodern condition” simultaneously (Dubey [on African-Americans] 2003, 8). These representations and critical strategies around representation seem to resist both diaspora and feminist studies’ relentless attempts at deconstruction.37 Through aesthetic innovation, Difficult Diasporas structures itself based on fronts of critical interest shared between diaspora and feminist studies. First and foremost, it reconsiders the primacy of location and the geography of bodies that often defines the former fields. Arguing that cultural flows are just as salient markers of “diaspora” as the migration of peoples, it tracks iconographies, art objects, and ideologies to create new networks of diaspora possibility beyond historically and geographically corresponding subjects. This move also shows in my methodology, drawing liberally from poststructuralist, deconstructionist, performance, and postcolonial theory as well as feminist, postcolonial, transnational, ethnic, and diaspora studies across regional and national traditions. In line with this project’s dislocation of the individual, historically coherent subject, it is also concerned with the often binary scripts that black women’s bodies occupy in diaspora studies (officially invisible, domesticated sites of trauma or its public, performative resistance) and in feminism (localized sites of economic and physical violence and/or collective romanticized, monolithic communities). These texts offer a tentative blueprint for considering the corporeal as necessarily containing both exploitative and progressive possibility, as they dwell in some of the most abject narratives and most innovative representations of black embodiment. Hence, the texts I collect in this innovative archive practice difficult descriptions of difference itself rather than provide definitions.38 The individual chapters engage feminist and diaspora debates over each field’s comparative failures of coherence. The first two chapters challenge the most overdetermined strategies for representing black women in the diaspora: location and corporeality. The next two chapters consider two key conceptual terrains of diaspora and feminism, history and modernity, from an innovative black feminist standpoint. Finally, the last two chapters question the value of narrative itself in representing diaspora

12 / introduction

feminist practice, disordering both “diaspora” and “feminism” as recognizable objects in their innovative collections. These texts do not, of course, exhaust the resources of formally innovative black literature.39 I focus on these particularly underrepresented texts in scholarship and teaching to make a distinct point about the wide gaps and absences in our curricular and canonical thinking around black women’s writing, as well as around diaspora and feminist studies at large. The paratactic, recombinant strategy of critical framing in Difficult Diasporas mirrors the fault lines it finds in a variety of mobile textual practices—for example, Deborah Richards’s Last One Out, with its layered text boxes, quotations from European travel narratives, and references to actress Dorothy Dandridge nested into a single poem or the unusually structured short story cycle/novella You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, with its singular narrator but large gaps in temporality and location. If poetry has long been the only scene for looking at poetics, this book also expands that terrain, thinking through the forms of prose from Jackie Kay’s mixed genre profile of Bessie Smith to Zora Neale Hurston’s uneven ethnography of the Caribbean, to the postmodern metatextual parts that make up Erna Brodber’s fragmented novel, to the complex relationships between plot and sequence that define the smallscale fictions of Bessie Head’s, Zoë Wicomb’s, and Pauline Melville’s collections. At the center of these prose and poetic negotiations lie both poetic interrogations of diaspora, in the form of nonnarrative collections and book-length lyrics, and perhaps the most critically neglected genre of black expression, experimental theater. Hence, I begin with Jackie Kay, a black Scottish writer of growing reputation, and the author of the Jazz-era transgender novel Trumpet, whose poetry and prose writing sit just outside the bounds of black recognition because of their focus on sexuality, transracial adoption, and Scottish culture. What happens when her liminal black experience comes into contact with what we might think of as a paradigmatic racial subject in the figure of blues singer Bessie Smith? How does someone who came to be and to know blackness outside of its normative boundaries—geographic, gendered, sexual, cultural—negotiate that diasporic identity differently, in literary form, than those who have access to easily marked routes? This first chapter, “The World and the ‘Jar’: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora,” focuses on Kay’s 1997 work Bessie Smith, a biographical contemplation of the blues singer mixed with a memoir of the author’s relationship to Smith’s image and recordings. As an amalgam of the blues and the discordant location of nineteen-sixties Scotland,

introduction / 13

this text lays the groundwork for reading diaspora through gender and sexual difference. Kay’s process of reincorporating Smith into Black British experience redefines the future of diaspora studies through connections that move unevenly across distant axes of space and time. I analyze nonsyncretic links between unlikely temporalities and geographies in Kay’s genre-bending prose, arguing that these aesthetic reconfigurations conceptualize the African diaspora as constitutive of queer and feminist readings beyond a literally traveling subject. In subsequent chapters, I choose combinations of authors and texts that act as just such “doorways” across national, regional, and reputational borders, in order to critically enact the kind of disordered diaspora that these works call for in their form. I move from Kay’s rearrangements of the foundational geographies of diaspora through gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and cultural circulation in the first chapter to poetic unsettlings of our understanding of the black body in the book’s second chapter, “It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body.” Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot (1990), and Richards’s Last One Out (2003), both poetry collections, reference black popular cultural figures such as Saartjie Baartman (the titular Venus Hottentot) to remap the difficult genealogy of black corporeality. Like Kay’s study of Smith, each collection explores how public concepts of race and gender take form in transatlantic visual and performative iconography, using modernist and postmodernist formal strategies. In doing so, these collections consider and critique models of diasporic subject formation that lean on example, exception, and recovery, creating instead a network of compromised affiliations and cosmopolitan desires that acknowledge both the pleasures and dangers of representation. Tracing a range of alternative ways to engage the vexed black body through its very visible global circulation, Alexander and Richards establish a new genealogy of black women’s bodies in innovative form. Alexander’s accessibly innovative poetic form reorders the legacies of iconic raced and gendered representations, as does the critically neglected Richards in her text-box visions of actress Dorothy Dandridge. In the third chapter, I take on a crucial period of black and experimental theater’s popularity in the explosive political and cultural scene of the nineteen-sixties by reaching across to Africa not for inspiration but for actual textual production. The unruly historical bodies renegotiated in chapter 2 lead to the embodied performances of history itself in chapter 3, “The Drama of Dislocation: Staging Diaspora History in the Work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo.” Ghanaian

14 / introduction

author Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1964 play The Dilemma of a Ghost and African American dramatist Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, performed the same year, dramatize the period’s various sociopolitical movements via the innovative staging of black women’s bodies. The year 1964 marks a time attendant to explosive political and social movements in the African and African American worlds, from Civil Rights and women’s rights movements in the United States to postcolonial national independence movements across the African continent. Aidoo’s play centers on an African American woman experiencing cultural and sexual dislocation in postcolonial Ghana with her African husband, while Kennedy’s play works around the psychological disintegration of a young black student in New York City. Working at the crossroads of major countercultural investments, these plays grapple with the lingering presence of colonial histories by creating scenes that question the mimetically realist boundaries of the body: stage directions that call for a wall to move through characters on the stage, for instance. Through their generic failures to perform realist resolution, the texts dislocate popular narratives of gendered, racial, and national community across diaspora histories, including the public sphere of politics in the contemporary Africa and African America of their day. Both playwrights negotiate diasporic histories with a critical eye toward claims of racial or gendered solidarity, much as the previous chapters question singular narratives of iconic black women. Like the first three chapters, chapter 4 looks back, this time to Zora Neale Hurston’s experimental anthropology, not just as a way of marking a legible black past but also as a sweeping study of how gender is at the heart of notions of political and cultural modernity. Paired with the critically neglected Jamaican academic and postmodern novelist Erna Brodber, who uses Hurston’s legacy as her springboard for considering the same post-Depression transnational era as the turn on which modern black feminist literary production stands, Hurston’s Tell My Horse claims diasporic affinities through form and genre as well as through location. This chapter, “Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity,” unpacks postmodern and proto- postmodern prose forms to engage a black feminist critique of “modernity” that refuses to keep black women locked into static historical notions of tradition. In Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) and Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), black women occupy the center of diaspora conceptions of modernity, particularly through the texts’ critique of modern African American, Caribbean, and Pan-African political

introduction / 15

movements. Hurston’s ethnography/memoir of her fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti explicitly draws links between US and Caribbean gender politics through the representation of spirit possession as a suspension and critique of the existing masculinist social order. As an imaginative reframing of the anthropological impulse in the study of race, Brodber’s novel similarly represents a Hurston-like subject possessed by diasporic black histories. Together, these prose assemblages reposition modernity—the historical and conceptual rise of rhetorics of both humanism and colonial power—as a signifier that not only is haunted by representations of gender and race but ungracefully and unevenly animates those categories’ competing discursive circulations and political imperatives. I also claim Hurston’s early text as a visionary aesthetic and generic practice, one that inspired Brodber’s own experimentation and inaugurates the genealogy of innovative textual engagements with gender, race, and diaspora that this book tracks. The reconsideration of the generative black feminist possibilities of prose to stage the conflict of transnational experience continues in chapter 5, “Intimate Migrations: Narrating ‘Third World Women’ in the Short Fiction of Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and Pauline Melville.” Through the short story collections of these South African and Guyanese writers— The Collector of Treasures (1977), You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), and The Migration of Ghosts (1999)—I explore the narrative dissonance that comes from the act of sequencing and organizing various representations of gender in their contemporary forms. I look to the critically neglected genre of the short story within its larger bounded form—the collection—in the work of these three postcolonial writers whose novels have found more critical attention: South African writers Head and Wicomb (who each sought exile, in Botswana and Scotland, respectively) and Guyanese/British writer Melville. With startling gaps in style, concept, and setting, these collections deny monolithic understandings of the “Third World Woman,” a term first unpacked by Chandra Mohanty (1984). These texts reconstruct gender as a collection of critiques of both state and transnational power formations. This chapter then argues for the strategic use of the collection as a form, one that reorganizes how we might read for sequential meaning without imposing narrative coherence; this critical move suggests a new way to read gender and race as relational analytic categories that abide by but also contain the power to disrupt the organizational logics of narrative representation, especially those that usually dominate discussions of “Third World Women”: family, law, culture, and capital.

16 / introduction

Taking the idea of the collection to its extreme, the final two texts I examine, by African American poet Harryette Mullen and Trinidadian-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip, stand as the visionaries of this new and innovative archive, mapping a diaspora that is aggressively informed and formally flexible. In chapter 6, “Impossible Objects: M. NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, and the Diaspora Feminist Aesthetics of Accumulation,” I engage the culmination of the aesthetic, methodological, and political concerns of Difficult Diasporas. This final chapter centers on Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995) and Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989). Both poets redeploy race, gender, and diaspora through the epic collection and accumulation of diasporic knowledge, displayed as book-length poems that do not follow a linear, chronological, or even conceptual narrative. These nonnarrative epics are testaments to the expansive potential of gender, race, and diaspora as critical categories of analysis, ones that can do far more than mimetically represent a reductive social reality for black women as subjects and for black women’s writing. These texts accumulate the “things” of diaspora and feminist knowledge that are impossible to fully reconcile within a singular order—and claim that this very incommensurability is the central tenet and driving force of our work across and around difference. Ultimately, the innovative forms of these texts embrace the necessary partialities and disconnections of comparative work as the condition of interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, and diaspora. This book centers on innovative aesthetics to expose, connect, and remake the forms of our desire for an ordered reality and, as James Baldwin articulates, our competing need for “escape” from that order (1985, 32). As such, Difficult Diasporas rethinks “the politics of our lack of knowledge” around race and gender (Lowe 2006, 206) by disordering the regimes of both power and resistance in terms of form and convention.40 Exposing and engaging these contradictory desires offers possibilities for new, impermanent affinities that not only exist within the terms of narrative cohesion but also interact with the critical values of failure, distance, disconnection, and displacement in constructing interdisciplinary knowledge and critical practice around diaspora feminism.41 The texts studied in this book give up the romance of a reading community that makes sense, representing instead the incoherence and failures of the state, of culture, and of our own critical and creative reading practices around diaspora.42 Through the centering of an innovative archive, a diaspora feminist aesthetics can do more than represent

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“black women” as an already known subject and object of study. The reordering of diaspora around aesthetic difficulty can rethink black women’s foundational significance to the very key terms we use in our work, especially diaspora. Remaking these terms through innovative form, the texts of Difficult Diasporas stand, pace Hunt, as “doorways” and as “commotions” on the paths of interdisciplinary progress around questions of identity and difference; they are simultaneously maps, links, and radical interruptions of the order of things as critics of gender and race know them.

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The World and the “Jar”: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora

A letter full of curses, again in Bessie’s handwriting to the manager of the 91 Club in Atlanta. An original record of “Downhearted Blues.” A reject selection of the songs that were never released. A giant pot of chicken stew still steaming, its lid tilted to the side. A photograph of Ethel Waters; underneath the sophisticated image Bessie has written: “Northern bitch. Long goody. Sweet Mama String Bean. 1922.” . . . A jar of Harlem night air. —jackie kay, Bessie Smith

Bessie Smith’s first hit, 1923’s “Downhearted Blues,” tells a familiar blues story of love and loss using the strange and fantastic metaphor of “the world,” “a jug,” and “the stopper”: “Got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / Got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / Going to hold it, baby, till you come under my command.” These objects form a complex relationship to one another: on the surface, the lyrics are another performance of a popular heterosexual romance imperative; of course, as has been well documented, blues songs’ engagement with “love” often exposes decidedly unpopular narratives of power and loss. In “Downhearted Blues,” the world is both trouble and possibility, the jug is limited from inside and outside, and the stopper represents control as well as the inability to act. As an image of cultural and self-containment, the verse haunts with its suggestion of the capacity and agency of black subjectivity, the ordinariness of a jug holding the extraordinary body of the world. Ralph Ellison uses a similar conceit in his 1964 essay analyzing the legacy of Richard Wright and of mainstream critical reception of black literature, “The World and the Jug”: “But if we are in a jug it is transparent, not opaque, and one is allowed not only to see outside but to read what is going on out there” (1995, 116). For him, the jug of public intellectual and artistic discourse limits how black writing (and black subjects) are held by the outside world to reflections of a particular form of tragic

the world and the “jar” / 19

realism. But Ellison is also concerned with how the black imaginary contained inside of this jug is similarly shaped by the devaluing of a variety of black aesthetic practices and influences by “sociology-oriented critics” (108). Ellison’s use of the popular lyric as the metaphor he borrows for his title connects the articulation of romantic desire in a classic blueswoman’s song to the stifling insistence on social realism as the model for reading black expression and discourse. In this chapter, I take Ellison’s titular gesture seriously in order to ask what the metaphorical work of gender, desire, and cultural form might have to offer in reframing the location of Black Atlantic discourse through the reordered spaces and temporalities of Jackie Kay’s work on Bessie Smith. This chapter engages Bessie Smith, poet and novelist Jackie Kay’s 1997 book-length profile of the blues singer, to begin to address this question, first and foremost by performing a literal gloss of the “world”; I examine how Smith’s and Ellison’s articulation of the paradoxes of power and black subjectivity relate to Kay’s decidedly broad geographical and historical spread—nineteen-sixties Scotland, early twentieth-century American South, nineteen-twenties Harlem, contemporary England. This immense and surprising “world” of the black diaspora interacts with the portability of the “jar”—Kay’s version of Smith and Ellison’s jug—as a reference to the quotidian, yet no less fantastic, spheres of gender and sexual desire that also thread through black aesthetic practice and cultural expression. Like Kay’s critically acclaimed novel Trumpet, Bessie Smith trades in the intersections of popular performance, Black British identity away from the metropole, and queer desire. Kay links the popular circulation of black subjectivity to the sphere of high formal literacy through her experimental form in the biography (made up of anecdotal evidence, fictional scenarios, and autobiographical reflection rendered in various typefaces within each chapter). Kay’s revaluation of Bessie Smith’s and her own relationship to “the world” of the black diaspora through her text exposes the overlaps and incommensurabilities found in various circulating models of black women’s identity in Ellison’s sense of the juglike lens of critical discourse. Reading Kay’s text as a model of the necessarily uneven transmissions that characterize the Black Atlantic lays the historical and intellectual groundwork for locating gender and sexuality within critical formulations of diaspora studies. This chapter traces how critical work on the black diaspora has frequently separated out popular cultural and performative work from self-consciously intellectual and political labor. Bessie Smith, I argue, repositions the integral and interruptive presence of black

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women’s popular performances within the genealogy of diaspora studies as an intellectual project. Kay’s text takes on the specific role of difference—sexual, gendered, geographic, and racial—within Smith’s work as a critique of totalizing narratives of blackness. In doing so, the text relocates the center of Black Atlantic discourse away from the metropolitan and toward a private genealogy of reception, one that finds that desire, race, and identification are much more slippery to define across the vast temporal and spatial variety of the black diaspora. As Katherine McKittrick argues in Demonic Grounds, looking at the nexus of race and geography can “make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic” (2006, x). Pushing this politics of location further, I argue that Kay’s text imagines a methodology for diaspora that traces the circulation of black cultural commodities, rather than the literal travel by black subjects, as a way to incorporate into the field a sustained engagement with difference. The violations of time, space, and subjectivity that Kay’s text foregrounds shift how we keep track of the critical locations of the Black Atlantic as a bounded historical moment with a legible intellectual past. Instead, Kay’s work challenges us to perform feminist revisions of diaspora and its critical futures through her geographic, historical, gendered, and queered interruptions of the recognizable routes of the black diaspora. This chapter suggests that these expansive modes of discursive circulation that characterize the black diaspora can also be innovative circuits for critically reading black women’s aesthetic performances and the feminist desires that connect and ground them to intellectual practice.

Night and Day It was in New York, February, 1923. Bessie and Jack were staying in Jack’s mother’s house on 132nd Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues. Above 132nd Street was a Harlem full of black people. —jackie kay, Bessie Smith

In a text that travels incessantly—from Chattanooga to Mississippi, from Philadelphia to Glasgow, from the US North to the South, from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-nineties, from autobiography to biographical fiction—Jackie Kay’s profile Bessie Smith spends very little time in or on Harlem. As the historical center of contemporary African American and black diaspora critical studies, and as the black aesthetic benchmark of the twentieth century, Harlem is more often than not the center of inquiry into the relationship between black literary expression

the world and the “jar” / 21

and the diasporic circulation of blackness. It is, at the very least, the cultural and ideological ground where there is “sense that certain venues are more authentic than others” from which other critical territories radiate (Procter 2003, 2). Harlem is also a resurgent area of critical interest in the past twenty years for diaspora theory, a site of renegotiating the nationalist flow of African American studies after Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking The Black Atlantic.1 The brief moments in Bessie Smith spent in this hub of black culture in the nineteen-twenties are usually related to the recording industry, as in the epigraph to this section, where Bessie is staying in Harlem to cut a record. No exception is the “jar of Harlem night air,” an item on a lengthy, three-page list imagined by Kay to populate a mythic trunk of Bessie-related materials compiled by her family and friends that “disappeared” in the nineteen-fifties, long after Smith’s death—an inventory that will figure heavily in my later analysis of the politics of diaspora circulation. The two very differently located references occupy familiar ideological spaces in theories of Harlem’s influence: Harlem as the practical and capital center of black artistic production and Harlem as the locale of the black imagination, the generative force of black diasporic performances across the twentieth century and in the critical discourse of African American studies.2 The “jar,” as opposed to the weight of Smith and Ellison’s “jug,” is a moment of textual whimsy and license on Kay’s part. “A Harlem full of black people” is a concrete, historical mark, a location “full of” racial significance and signification. While the latter has obvious implications for this chapter’s concern with the consequences of gender and class in the way we conceive of the “space” of the black diaspora, this section also takes up Harlem’s more ethereal strains that circulate with a difference in Kay’s work, as well as the way we, as critics, imagine the possibilities and portability of black diasporic connections beyond social realism or romantic fetishization. Claiming a center for black artistic production has practical and symbolic import for Harlem Renaissance intellectuals of the nineteen-twenties. Harlem in a jar, then, is a distillation that both carries and contains the ideological and aesthetic freight of “The New Negro,” Alain Locke’s foundational Harlem Renaissance essay: Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of

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the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. . . . So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great racewelding. . . . In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital. ([1925] 1992, 7) Here, Locke is doing the intellectual work of making Harlem a racial symbol, “full of” blackness of a particular kind. Trying to contain Harlem is difficult business, with rhetorical strategies that claim exceptionality and representativeness at the same time. Harlem as a site is an “instance,” a “first” of potentially many, or later, a “promise” of the future. As example or model, Locke’s Harlem wants to be accessible, a representative of pending communities and “New Negro” subjects around the world—a race capital, not the only one. But it is also exceptional—the “largest,” the experimental site of New Negro formation, the laboratory. As both template and a break from the mold, Locke’s work to rhetorically produce and locate Harlem as “race capital” also hails a certain elemental population as representative group. He relies on the word “man” four times in his exhaustive catalogue of Harlem’s new migrant population. It is certainly not new to point out the masculine-humanist subject that sits at the center of discursive production of the Harlem Renaissance, nor the practical reverberations of who literally can move through the “race capital” with ease in the nineteen-twenties. An extension of the masculinized citizen of this emerging Harlem is the site of Harlem itself, its ideological capital or currency that travels, taking on this gendered property. My concern with the gendering of intellectual space here is partially because the energy of nineteen-twenties Harlem, the night air in a jar referenced in Kay’s imagined catalogue, is distinctly about a different set of aesthetic and popular practices—the “nightlife” of Harlem, its clubs and balls and scenes. This “night work” of Harlem is its romantic currency, more what we think of as the substance of Kay’s jar and Smith’s lyrics and as opposed to the “day work” of intellectually drawing on what is kept in that jar. In other words, Locke’s “Harlem” is the critical work that certifies intellectual and historical significance. But what circulates most prominently as the popular “idea” of Harlem, its source rather than

the world and the “jar” / 23

its ideological product or theory, is its nighttime identity, its jazz, blues, and sexualized culture. As the center through which the black diaspora is thought or constructed (even if it is to decenter), the day work of intellectual and literary production and the night work of performance are also sold as separately gendered spheres; the famous founding fathers of early black thought are, overwhelmingly, “fathers,” including Locke, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor, whereas essayist and author Jessie Fauset is considered a “midwife” and Zora Neale Hurston an exuberant outlier.3 The night work becomes the root and inspiration for internationalism, the performative call that allows the traveling intellectual and political project of black solidarity. Black women performers such as Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker, as the most visible signs and stars of said call, are not easily incorporated into the production of intellectual responses that we locate as the work of the black diaspora—anthologies, print culture, and even reprinted literature. In a more contemporary moment, developments in US black feminist theory around women’s performances4 came at a time when a new subfield, that of diaspora studies, had also been emerging out of African American and postcolonial studies.5 Locke’s gauntlet, his gesture toward the cosmopolitan makeup of Harlem as location and symbol, is one that galvanizes the three major categories of time—the past (“the first concentration in history”), the present (“Negro life is seizing”), and the future (Harlem “promises to be” the center of New Negro citizenship). His challenge to this “new” field, then, is a mark of the complicated temporal territory that emerging critical discourse must occupy. Looking not just across the present cultural world but to its history and potential, Locke’s challenge has been taken up by critics such as Brent Edwards, who challenges this gendered omission in suggesting that “a nascent feminism” and feminist intellectual project was at the center of black internationalism’s discursive and practical formation. Edwards’s suggestion of a systemic approach to diaspora through feminist thought is one that potentially considers the gendered “practice” of diaspora criticism beyond mere representation of women. I come again to Harlem, and to Bessie Smith, as a possible model for the kind of day and night work that black diaspora studies can account for and model through a feminism that is in fact embedded in a set of practices not fully recognized as intellectual work. Returning to Bessie Smith’s significance to the intellectual projects of Ellison and Kay, where can we locate her work in the context of diaspora’s

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intellectual routes? While black women entertainers such as Josephine Baker have been taken up as signs and even subjects of twenties and thirties black cosmopolitanism, they are rarely considered authors, or founders in the vein of Césaire or Senghor or Du Bois, of intellectual and political discourse.6 As Shane Vogel argues in his analysis of the political and intellectual significance of the space of early Harlem nightclubs, even at the time, many African American intellectuals “saw the Negro Vogue, with its tendency toward black sensuousness, exhibitionism, primitivism, and sensationalism, as a distraction from, or worse, an impediment to their vision of the renaissance” (2009, 3). Though contemporary critics may not explicitly mimic this middle-class value system of respectability, the continuing intellectual gap points not just to the difficulties of translating gender, class, and genre into the textual analysis that critics work from but also to our static conception of “conscious” political thought and black intellectualism as a whole. While, as aesthetic practices, cultural performances (and performers such as Smith) have been represented on the field of diaspora, they are often only references, subjects or songs that do the direct work of traveling but not the more substantial critical work of defining diaspora (as opposed to, as well, novel and narrative formations of diaspora of the time such as in Claude McKay’s work). In theorizing the blues, it is key to consider how we think of intellectual traveling as distinct from generic and performative traveling (touring) as “work.” Like the attempt to render Harlem as the portable essence suggested by Kay’s jar, the romanticization of blues traveling becomes reified, located in Harlem but exportable in conceptual work. Kay strategically uses this affective register of “the embodied practices of black performance and spectatorship” to imagine not an essence but a series of excessive connections that constitute diaspora through the specter of incommensurable difference (Vogel 2009, 6). Written in 1997 as part of what was called the “Q series” of queer biographies of prominent cultural figures, Kay’s profile engages those romantic and celebratory modes mentioned earlier in its construction of Smith as an icon.7 But Kay’s text does not start in Harlem, nor anywhere near a “center” of black culture. Formally, it begins with a poem from Kay’s sequence on Smith in 1993’s Other Lovers, “The Red Graveyard.” The poem begins and ends with a four-line, standard blues refrain on Bessie Smith’s haunting transatlantic cultural presence. But this frame, like Harlem, contains a surprisingly memoirish center. The substance of the five contained stanzas is the narrator’s personal experience of the

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blues, of listening to Bessie Smith. At its center lies a stanza ruminating not on Smith’s voice but on Kay’s mother’s Scottish lilt. The description is comprehensive, another catalogue like Locke’s, and the longest stanza of the poem: My mother’s voice. What was it like? A flat stone for skitting. An old rock. Long long grass. Asphalt. Wind. Hail. Cotton. Linen. Salt. Treacle. I think it was a peach. I heard it down to the ribbed stone. (1997, 7) Is this the voice of the blues? we are forced to ask. The description introduces a recognition of radical difference contained within familiar structure. The sharp, consonant texture of each distinct word for the mother’s voice pushes against the lolling resonance of the speaker’s own action in engaging in Bessie Smith’s black image: “I pick up the record cover. And now. This is slow motion. / My hand swoops, glides, swoops again” (8). Before we learn from the narrative that Kay is the queer, black, adopted daughter of white, Scottish parents in nineteen-sixties Scotland, before we necessarily imbue this scene with biographical authority, Kay introduces us to the difficulties of reading diaspora, not the least of which are the operations of memory, desire, culture, familiarity, and genealogy and their relationship(s) to the construction, recognition, and maintenance of racial identity.8 Structurally, the book also troubles easy organization. The book’s cover promises biography, yet we are confronted by autobiography, as well as fictional prose, editorial commentary, and nonlinear organization. And Kay’s formal and conceptual gestures toward an alternate model of black transnationalism extend to the realm of reception, as well. Bessie Smith begins not with a story of black tradition, a link through the black community to the individual or a cultural heritage indigenous to nation or region. Instead, Kay begins her profile of black American blues performer Bessie Smith with her own anomalous location (1997, 9). Her genealogy itself disrupts any stable conception of a black public sphere; here, there is no urban black community from which to draw culture. Instead, the “house of the blues” turns out to be both nationally and racially “outside” such a conception (9). Not “the most likely place to be introduced to the blues,” Kay’s location forces her to foreground her difference in a very specific, localized world, where contact with black culture is always already mediated by a white context—the home of her white, Scottish parents (9). As

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an un-“likely place” for the exchange of black music, Kay’s textual home recognizes racially and geographically surprising encounters as meaningful and productive to black subjectivity, even and especially for subjects found at the margins of the Black Atlantic. Taking up the position of blues figures as icons and/or heroes through the medium of transnationalism links back to the romantic narrative of blues traveling, one that matches the “romance” of corresponding diasporas without a call to authenticity.9 What Kay does differently is to spin that seduction outward, toward surprising sites of identification: “I did not think that Bessie Smith only belonged to African Americans or that Nelson Mandela belonged to South Africans. I could not think like that because I knew then of no black Scottish heroes that I could claim for my own. I reached out and claimed Bessie” (1997, 15). Bessie Smith does a kind of iconic diaspora traveling which Kay does not perform physically, instead constructing a mobile identification that is self-consciously nonessentialist even in its romantic call to agency.10 This call, too, imagines links beyond the literal travel of bodies and bodies of text, linking political, cultural, and intellectual capital to an imaginative diaspora constructed through idiosyncratic experiences of race, nationality, sexuality, and gender. Kay’s bringing of Bessie Smith into a national as well as racial and queer “family”11 instead imagines routes of identification in scattered histories, as well as specifically queered roots where bloodlines and national boundaries, though clearly delineated and incredibly present, cannot dictate alliances made across such borders (much like the plot of Trumpet).12 Kay’s claiming of Smith as icon, hero, and signifier crosses desire with location, blackness with sexual subjectivity, national belonging with transhistorical imaginative traveling. In other words, Kay instead constructs an imaginative exchange sought out precisely because of the challenges of physical space. The black feminist subject “could not think like that”—within the limits of national-racial borders—because she would erase her own contingent subjectivity.13 That complex subject formation is sometimes lost in the reinstituted split of the “day” and “night” work of intellectual practice and aesthetic culture. Kay reimagines Smith and other cultural performers into the same space as political leaders, public figures unquestionably linked to the politics of blackness, and vice versa; she posits public politics as aesthetic culture by including political figures in the company of artistic icons: I force myself to imagine her real death. . . . It is a peculiar way of getting even closer to her. It is a strange thing to do. Somehow the

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death of the famous activates the popular imagination. The deaths of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Billie Holiday, Bob Marley are all epic, grand scale deaths. . . . The life of every true hero is bent on ending in tragedy. Heroes can’t help themselves. (1997, 140) Kay’s romantic strain pulls her to a conceptual space not unlike Harlem, a space where day and night workers mingle in “the popular imagination,” or what Kay herself calls “fantasy relationships” (Jaggi and Dyer 1999, 55). Rescaling Holiday, Marley, and Smith as icons in the political company of King and Malcolm X also reshapes the scope of how we read black culture as a (celebrity) system. The “epic” and classical frame that Kay places on Smith et al. is in “Shakespearean dimensions,” the space worthy of not just political attention but critical and analytic seriousness, a scale of black cultural production worthy of the most sustained study and significance (ibid., 54). In a representative sense, black political heroes famous enough to circulate for Kay were men—Mandela, Malcolm X, King. Kay’s effect in upsetting distinctions between imported entertainment icons and political leaders is not just to integrate the two kinds of discourse associated with blackness—aesthetic and political—but to make visible a transatlantic subjectivity centered on questions of gender and sexuality. Bringing Smith or even Holiday into the fold “adds” women to the genealogy of the black political by shifting the criteria of what constitutes the political as an intellectual category and through reckoning with the power and complexity of iconographic identification through differential history and geography. Black music coming to Kay cannot follow a public or racially communal pattern of receiving; there are no dancehalls or radio stations to transmit or render coherent Kay’s queer desires in listening to Smith. Kay’s claiming Smith as “hero” maintains an alignment between her and someone like Nelson Mandela, breaking down the opposition between public and private, day and night work, and between identifications with race and those with gender and sexuality. Aligning Smith as a “hero”—national or Pan-African—also displaces an even split between public and private spheres of influence. Rather than being publicly and collectively experienced, the blues and recognizably “black” culture privately circulate to Kay through her white home: My best friend, Gillian Innes, loved Bessie Smith. We spent many hours in Gillian’s bedroom, imitating Bessie Smith and Pearl Bailey. Various objects served as microphones from hairbrushes to wooden spoons. At the age of twelve singing . . . was a way of

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expressing our wild emotions for each other. . . . I could barely breathe. The air in her box bedroom was thick with secrets. The door firmly shut. Our own private performance. (1997, 79) Here, the objects of daily life (a hairbrush, wooden spoons) need to be imaginatively transformed in order to express “wild emotions” or to connect body and desire to everyday life. Such is the importance of the Smith record as everyday object in Kay’s narrative, repeatable and accessible even as it opens up the possibilities of nonlocal discourses of race and sexuality.14 In Kay’s configuration, the private is neither metaphor for nor escape from the public and political but something that is constitutive of the public and the political itself. For Kay, these surprising correspondences, rather than so expansive as to empty out the specificity of “diaspora,” play out in an incredibly contained space that performs the difficulty of constraining black identity through identification with urban centers of (im)migration. Mimicry, here, also becomes a way of accessing and narrating a desire outside of recognizable or popularly circulated black culture.15 But Kay reimagines outsiderness as literally and conceptually inside, again making gender and sexuality the constitutive core of the Black Atlantic. Returning here to Kay’s opening poem “The Red Graveyard,” I argue that Bessie Smith subverts privileged diasporic routes through a private genealogy of being “passed down” rather than the public reception of black cultural production, with Kay asking rhetorically of her white parents, “Did they play anyone else ever?” (1997, 7). Neither the pubic nor the private can be assumed to be homogeneous racial spaces for Kay’s diaspora. It is this private reception, a reception that happens via a familial “passing down,” that Kay identifies as racially—and sexually—meaningful. Her project attempts a queer genealogy beginning with Ma Rainey, who “was also a lesbian” (36), according to the bold-voiced narrator, as well as imagines a network of black queer women—including Rainey, Smith, Ethel Waters, and a host of chorus girls and dancers at the center of twenties and thirties black diaspora cultural production.16 This queer family tree for black culture, and the Harlem Renaissance period in particular, becomes difficult to fit squarely into legible racial and political discourse. Reconstructed through the text as a site of pleasurable exchange, Bessie Smith reorders the genealogy of black culture and black reception and redesigns a “passing down” that could include the trauma of black diasporic history as well as the silenced desires of black feminist/queer culture and public discourse. Kay’s choice to maintain the

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ideological and aesthetic quandaries of black diaspora identification in their messy interconnectedness reframes our own intellectual practices, as well as models of social, aesthetic, and intellectual engagement drawn from the practice of classic blueswomen singers such as Smith. Accessing “home” as a site of disruptions within continuity, the foreign within the familiar, Kay’s work represents an impulse to bring discussions of the exterior “world” and the interiority of black subject formation together through black cultural and aesthetic productions.17 With only partial access to documented history, Kay’s text also imagines a certain portability, like the “jar of Harlem night air,” to imaginative, interior space, the kind of transnational “flow” usually accorded only to cultural products and political ideas themselves.18 In other words, I read Kay not as attempting to find the biographical and historical “truth” behind or beyond the icon Smith but as finding in the icon itself a depth of meanings and identifications—an interior but still nonessentialist “life” of queer, black intellectual purpose. Kay does not just mark her desire to “be” Bessie but to watch her, to want her, to claim her into her “home”: I remember taking the album off him [Kay’s father] and pouring over it, examining it for every detail. Her image on the cover captivated me. She looked so familiar. She looked like somebody I already knew in my heart of hearts. I stared at the image of her, trying to recall who it was she reminded me of . . . . I put her down and I picked her up. I stroked her proud, defiant cheeks. I ran my fingers across her angry eyebrows. I soothed her. Sometimes I felt shy staring at her, as if she was somehow able to see me looking. . . . I would never forget her. (1997, 9–10) The romantic, earnest identification with Smith and her blackness is persistently undergirded by the frame of uneasy reception—complications of desire, of race, of historical time, of capital product, and of national allegiance for a young girl who is the only black person in her entire town. Containing both a feeling of knowing “familiar[ity]” and of voyeuristic “captivat[ion],” Kay’s text reads Smith as an icon and as a body seriously—intimately linking “seeing” her as a desirous encounter with another vision of a black woman in Kay’s resolutely white surroundings, as well as with the sexually “captivating” draw of Bessie’s photographic performance on the album cover. Such an incorporation of black music as cultural product into a private discourse of racial and sexual identification challenges any privileging of immediate and live performances.

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Considering the inaccessibility of live performance for marginal subjects to experience black music, Bessie Smith recasts the role of cultural artifacts as meaningful in recovering a lost time of black history—a recovery project at the heart of the explosion of diaspora studies. While there is danger in the fetishization of blackness as a mere series of images without depth, Kay’s text explores how identification with an image can also be valuable in reframing historical “blackness” itself as a legible field. Of course, the imagined identification between Kay and Smith is also nostalgic—both for Kay’s childhood attachment to Smith and for the romance of blues ideology itself. Bessie is “proud,” “defiant,” and “angry” to Kay’s “shy” subject. The album acts as a type of souvenir of blackness for the text, standing in for the “recognizable” experience of blackness that Kay as an isolated black subject cannot access or approximate. As such, it represents the “extraordinary” experience of that margin as well as the ordinariness or ubiquity of black culture itself, circulated as widely as nineteen-sixties Scotland (Stewart 1984, 135). The experience of the album as an object of desire is almost comic in its excess in Bessie Smith, where Kay’s speaker can “put her down” and “pick her up” in the name of race memory—to be “captivated,” “reminded,” “already kn[own],” and “never forg[otten].” If, as Susan Stewart has suggested, the souvenir is a product embodying both “distance and intimacy” (1984, 137), the album as cultural experience and cultural artifact embodies these contradictions of diaspora as a concept that imagines close connection across unfathomable large-scale terrain. But instead of placing “lived” experience with “the nostalgic myth of contact and presence [through] the memory of the object,” there is only the experience of a myth, and the object/souvenir, to begin with (ibid., 133). Bessie Smith engages in the cultural souvenirs of the public domain—publicity photographs, album covers, birth certificates, headstones, as well as icons such as Nelson Mandela—precisely to call attention to a lack of “live” connection to blackness, as well as to call or conjure up some version of that connection. Rather than a referent to a single experience, the album as diasporic souvenir connotes complex cultural memory, not just taking on the “two sides” of Bessie Smith (the front and back of the album cover) but “transport[ing]” Kay “places, creating scenes and visions” of a variety of unreal and locatable spaces in the black cultural imaginary from “The Haunted House Blues” to being a “St. Louis Gal” (Kay 1997, 10). The scene of identification imagines Kay’s close, intimate contact with the image of Smith as having the ability to violate and transform the

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borders of historical, national, racial, sexual, and geographic space, all within the interiority of a private home. The souvenir as metaphor for the experience of the black diaspora, then, also embodies the constant “failure” of the object to add up, to fill up or complete the experience of blackness. Instead, Kay narrates the repetitive contact between the subject of the black diaspora and her thwarted desire for a more coherent understanding of her diasporic belonging and marginalization at the same time. Kay “desire[s] souvenirs of events that are repeatable,” against Stewart’s reading (1984, 135), in that the trauma of black transatlantic history embodies exceptional pain and the repetitive infliction of that pain.19 In other words, Kay fetishizes Smith as a souvenir as much for her exceptionalism as for her representativeness. Kay’s engagement with the souvenirs of diasporic legacy posits the simultaneous distance and intimacy of that recurring memory and the aesthetic responses to it that have made up modern black cultural production. To close this consideration of new pathways of diasporic cultural flows, I now return to Harlem as site and as “nostalgic myth” (Stewart 1984, 133). Late in Bessie Smith, Kay reimagines “gossip” surrounding Smith’s exploits, in her chapter “Tales of the Empress.” In particular, she re-creates the scene of a 1928 party hosted by Carl van Vechten, noted Harlem Renaissance patron and a member of the white cultural elite. Kay’s mode, as usual, is fierce identification with Smith herself: Heard tell about 1928. The Empress arrives with Porter Grainger, the composer of her current show, Mississippi Days, dressed up to the nines in ermine and dripping with jewels. Right aways she realizes she is on alien territory. There’s a whole sea of white faces staring at her and the polite white handshake of van Vechten is no comfort. She is out of her depth, and she sure as hell is not going to drown. Whenever the Empress is out of her own territory, she defends herself with her own aggression. (1997, 104) The “tale” goes on to tell of Smith knocking down van Vechten’s white wife after a patronizing request for a good-bye kiss from the blues singer. In another text, and even in the context of Kay’s no-fault portrait of Smith, this episode would seem par for the course—celebrating a blueswoman’s bawdiness, her “difference” from white culture and codes of behavior, her rebellion against even the subtle racial and gendered limits of dominant culture. The portrait of Smith is of the resisting-victim variety—certainly not a new form for black literature. But couched as it is in Kay’s own location as the only black face among a sea of white ones,

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including her parents, in a nation that is “alien territory” for easily recognizable blackness, this anecdote potentially tells a different story of the locations of blackness. Kay longs for black identifications and familiarity within the confines of her immediate, white-identified space. Her textual persona does not revolt but rather locates a space in her parents’ house, in her best friend’s box bedroom, to experience blackness differently. Smith’s reaction may be an act of displaced desire, but it is also Kay’s suggestion of the limits even of recognizably black and white experience, the limits of a small apartment in a city and time “full of” blackness. The box bedroom and the grand arc of imaginary diaspora geographies suggested in this section begin to expand the ways we might think of space and location in the frame of the black diaspora. The transurban centers that define Black Atlantic exchange—Harlem, London, Paris, Port-au-Prince, and so on—remain key destinations but are decentered as sources in Kay’s profile and as the most meaningful sites of production.20 But Kay also refuses a retreat to “the local” as characterized by antimodern, romanticized representations of the folk in African American criticism, on the one hand, or the homogeneous indigeneity of the developing world in the case of some transnational feminist constructions. Instead, Bessie Smith asks, “What does a girl from Bishopbriggs near Glasgow know about Chattanooga?” (1997, 17) and assumes a collection of circulating objects of “research,” a popular culture archive, if you will, of songs, an atlas, a biography of Billie Holiday, a bottle of CocaCola, that informs that exchange (17–19). Her invocation of sources is, as nonfiction goes, uneven at best; but it is not a thoroughness that Kay is after but an ethereal itinerary, with pins stuck in the places—past, present, and future—that diaspora routes might travel, even unexpectedly. Kay’s structural project in Bessie Smith destabilizes Harlem as the center of a map of black culture, aesthetics, and intellectual practice but more importantly reimagines what it (could) mean to evoke diaspora as a method and as an analytical category founded on the notion of mass migration of peoples from one place to another. On a critical scale, diaspora studies has privileged travel as perhaps the defining characteristic of subaltern subjectivity, of the postnational, postcolonial condition. If space is usually centered in such discourses in terms of geography and borders, Kay takes up the mobile object as center instead—not just the live body but also the image, the circulation which extends past that body but is no less material than Harlem itself or Kay’s metaphorical jar. The key to such alternate figurations of objects and difference lies partially in Fred Moten’s provocative statement that “the history of blackness is

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testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003, 1). Whether it is the found album or the recovered stories of Bessie Smith as cultural icon, Kay’s text emphasizes the possibility of the object in resisting master narratives of meaning and capitalist value (ibid., 9–10). The key to alternate readings lies in the object’s frame. For Kay, the trope of the unusual frame, or the black cultural object showing up in a variety of racially coded locations, including her own text, points not to the resistant object itself as much as how its frame takes both Kay and the reader out of the assumed circuits of African diaspora circulation. First and foremost, Kay’s unusual frame is Black British, or Scottish, to be exact, in comparison to the (African) American South. Claiming only the refrain from a popular song as reference, Kay vividly imagines a fairly stock vision/version of the South. Touching the atlas, her narrator starts with negation: “Well, it wasn’t like Glasgow. It wouldn’t be like anywhere I had been” (1997, 16). Blackness, for Kay’s exceptional Scottish black diaspora experience, is a series of external, Americanized references—a cinematic Western, an atlas, a series of song lyrics. That blackness registers as paradigmatically American, rooted in the folk of the South at the cusp of the great migration, is not surprising given the late-capital centrality of that narrative’s dispersal in cultural flows. It is also not surprising for the Black British context, in which “black” as an identity and a community struggles to find visibility in the multicultural state—a difficulty most famously reported by Gilroy’s infamous title, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (1991). The cultural production of Black British citizens, who do not discursively figure in the national imaginary, signals not just to nostalgic home communities but to global connections to the most powerfully identified community of black creative and intellectual production, African American culture. But even as large portions of Bessie Smith traffic in this seemingly oneway global economy, Kay’s text interrupts the process by figuring American blacks as curious and creative about places outside of that “river” of American black folk culture. Kay constructs this through imagined contact with the aforementioned lost trunk, negotiated through Smith’s sisters: “Before they died, Tillie and Viola sent it on a ship headed for Scotland. They had seen pictures of Scotland and liked the look of the country, those big goddam mountains” (1997, 57). Shipping the archive away from recognizable blackness, Kay imagines that infamous trunk filled with three and a half pages’ worth of black commodity culture, from “Ma Rainey’s gold fillings” to a Cadillac steering wheel to documentation of death and marriage (60). The search for black history is

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material and embodied (baby teeth) as much as it is ephemeral (the air in the jar)—and the inorganic sits next to the natural, much as the radical break of emigration leaves Black British identity uneasily and unevenly in proximity to British colonial ideology. Kay’s injection of Scotland into the imaginary of the black South, the reverse route, and her desire to locate the archive of the blues outside of the major ports of the Black Atlantic, is also her bid to map black international and intellectual practice, as well as history, as an unpredictable geography, where the territory of black women’s imaginary practices creates material futures unaccounted for in the obsessive focus on official documents of print and state culture. Kay does not recenter the margin as much as she converts location into an object—the transurban commodity of the black site becomes mobile, a cite and a cipher.21 Less invocation than circulation, these objects do not stand in for but are the black diaspora—counted along with the archive, print culture, and the lingering effects of the past. Alongside this are the affective resonances of these diaspora objects and their surprising present meanings—hurtling even sooner toward unsettling and unpredictable future uses. Kay’s text makes use of the past not just for the present but for the radical potentiality of diaspora circulation and (dis)connection—tracing what gets “lost,” not to be lamented but to be made up wholesale, again. Diaspora is made to awkwardly fit into a future that it never imagined as its domain, in order to highlight the disjuncture that characterizes black experiences of modernity and of diaspora. Incommensurable loss and incompatible knowledges are the base of Kay’s black world, where even when “found,” the “lost” blackness does not come from or mean what it should. This occurs even as Bessie Smith tries to break Bessie-as-icon’s story, into the queer time and space of even those black objects we may read as clear, contextualized, familiar—the blues, for instance. Diaspora, despite the text’s longing for recognizable narrative and troping, is far stranger to account for than its historically and geographically bounded disciplinary arguments entail. Kay bleeds genres, blending history into myth, authenticity into self-conscious construction, pattern into innovation, imagination into tradition. Within the limits of who and what we might recognize as “Bessie Smith,” Kay finds room for the world and the jar, the universal and the particular, difference and detail. Kay’s text sees and seeks difference within the diaspora because of that drive toward definition, toward the object of “knowing” Bessie Smith, the blues, or the Black Atlantic. That play between lost and found

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is the play between desire and innovation. Out of a wish to belong to, or to speak to, community also comes a desire for distinction, or rather a claim to it. Smith is representative and exceptional, as is Kay’s approach. Glasgow, Harlem, Chattanooga—they are jars and worlds each, available in their material and historical specificity as well as their more portable, metaphoric resonances. Bessie Smith suggests that what is lost in diaspora scholarship that attempts to lock down, intentionally or not, more singular strains/routes of blackness is a sense of the necessary simultaneity of the world and the jar, of how even radical specificity can translate and transport to the unpredictable time of critical futures. The order of the things in Kay/Smith’s imaginary trunk, then, is the order of diaspora—which is still, for Kay, the order of location. In the economy of travel, the thing is always already a souvenir, a memory/ metonym of the Other. In the economy of emigration, the thing is either reminder or imperial commodity, the play between local and global. Both are locked in the thinking of late capital, in which history is marked by the consumption of metonymic things and their transport. For Kay, this logic of enchantment/disenchantment both holds firm and is violated by turning travel and emigratory space into the contact with and scope of what Lizabeth Paravasini-Gebert calls “transit”—evoking less definite yet more repetitive routes to the diasporic practices of black women subjects.22 This circulation suggests a different order, timing, and geography of distribution, in Kay’s text, so that Bessie Smith as historical figure can travel from tent shows to Harlem to Mississippi to Chattanooga (“down and out” to “down” and “out”), while her anecdotal and iconic presence registers her in publicly and privately consumed objects, here collected from the geography of Glasgow to the print-culture artifact of a British queer profiles series. While Kay may still rely on the trope of haunting that seems to follow black women subjects, her form and structure insists on location and material—Chattanooga, trunks, wax—the constant transit between “lost” and “found” object, between the archive and the imaginary, public and private space, and the relationship between object and context, or, for Kay’s text, object and collection that redefines diaspora. Bessie Smith, as print-culture document, projects itself into the act of collection, even as it stands as one profile in a series of queer recoveries of creative icons, from David Hockney to Benjamin Britten. Kay’s “Outline,” as the series is titled, of Smith’s queer history takes travel and more particularly transit as its structure in an attempt to collect the disparate references and evidence of black women’s subjective and sexual desires,

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many of which cannot register without the intellectual weight of archival narratives to infuse them with singular meaning. Kay’s focus on travel in her profile of Bessie Smith, indeed, has much to do with this traveling desire for identification and black women’s particular inability to locate a documented home in diaspora studies and late-capital discourse: “Even later in her life when she could have afforded not to travel all over the place, she continued to do so” (1997, 30). Kay goes on to label Bessie a “travel addict,” claiming that her compulsively touring was not just out of a romanticization of live performance (which is frequently coupled with a reviling of the recorded commodity, impossible for Kay as it is her only available narrative record and “encounter” with Smith) but because of the ability to act out queer desire outside of the constructs of domestic geography. Kay ultimately sees the reperformance and recirculation of Bessie Smith’s music—as well as the performer’s iconography in the form of stories which the speaker resituates to literally create a system of exchanges—as a process of traveling queerness, or what queer theorist José Muñoz might call an act of “world-making” (1999, 195). These worlds stand in excess of the question of capital, of what Smith, or Kay, “could,” conditionally tensed, “afford.” Jackie Kay identifies Bessie Smith as creating her own world, a network or genealogy of queer black women, but it is through the mark of performance that this network becomes visible and articulated, as well as how it “transports” to other imaginary and material worlds. Recorded performance, in object form, makes visible (both in myth and text) a world for Kay, even if she has to reconstruct that text in order to “see.” Her goal is a traveling reception that establishes a collectivity of racial identity through what is unspeakable, and unspeakably different, in the cultures of the Black Atlantic, rather than through similarity or authenticity. Travel itself, then, is different for black women’s intellectual and performative practices in the diaspora. It is, as a model, a fabulous, and fabulist, performance of the diasporic subject. Like the world and the jar, or the global and the local, it is the relationship between paradigmatic African American and even Black Atlantic subjectivity (in the bluesman and the sailor) and that of black women that is at stake: The image of the blueswoman is the exact opposite of the bluesmen. There they are in all their splendour and finery, their feathers and ostrich plumes and pearls, theatrical smiles, theatrical shawls, dressed up to the nines and singing about the jailhouse. The blueswomen are never seen wearing white vests or poor dresses, sitting

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on a porch in some small Southern town. No, they are right out there on that big stage, prima donnas, their get-ups more lavish than a transvestite’s, barrelhousing, shouting, strutting their stuff. They are all theatre. . . . It is all there in the blues: believable and theatrical at the same time. The opposite of social realism. Realism with a string of pearls thrown in. (1997, 64) Like the day and night work of Harlem, genre does not lose its significance in circulation, critical or otherwise. This passage from “Wax” points back to the paradox of serious diaspora work, of wanting “authentic” documentation to bolster ideological worlds, passing up the jars that do not match up with our sense of authentic black experience—in content or in (corporeal) form. Whether it is the heaviness of the trunk or the shallow groove of wax, the record of diaspora studies is lost and found in any number of locations off the map of either “Bessie’s blues tour,” as documented in the text’s appendix, or the typical routes of the Black Atlantic. Black women’s innovative writing and intellectual practice is the territory of diaspora, “social realism” and visionary romance imagined “at the same time.”

Keeping Queer Time Harlem, I grant you, isn’t typical—but it is significant, it is prophetic. —alain locke, “The New Negro”

Both accidental and calculated, timing is everything in considering the blues. As the world and the jug, the possibilities and limits of Harlem as a geographic and ideological space, shift over time and space, black diaspora studies has been eager to map their transit, through and outside of Harlem as a vexed site of critical productivity—in particular, the “day work” of “night work,” or the recording of blues records themselves. In the middle of Bessie Smith comes a chapter titled “Wax,” which focuses on the making of blues songs as well as blueswomen as black cultural icons. Jackie Kay lets us know early that “the first blues recording was an accident,” even as she documents the racial-sexual exploitation that accompanied subsequent industry decisions regarding the genre (1997, 63). Like the souvenir that wraps both the intimacy and distance of diaspora, “time,” even more than space, can signify both linearity and interruption.23 This timing holds the orderly and disorderly as well as the continuity and breaks mapped earlier in thinking about Kay’s unusual relationship to location and specific diaspora cultures.24

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This scale extends to models of constantly moving, “migratory subjects,” which threaten to keep diaspora constantly on the move, the haunt but never the territory of established critical practices.25 Thinking qualitatively about time’s relationship to diaspora suggests a new and refocused, if still capacious, organizing system for diaspora studies. “Time” can serve as a differential category in our analysis of the black diaspora’s cultural flows, with its modes of tracking and structuring rhythms, as well as being able to hold the long-term and the immediate. Time is a measurement, a way of gauging the expense and profit of history and culture. If the imaginary takes on propertied significance for Kay’s positioning of surprising diasporic connections, then time offers us a system, not just a haunt, to speak critically about their significance. As Judith Halberstam has cogently argued, “queer uses of time and space” (2005, 1) are more than just the tracks of discrete and recognizable identities; they are also reorderings of normative genealogies, those of “reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” (6), that produce “counterpublics” hewed to the geographies of unruly and nonnormative desire. Gender, sexual, and formal variety thus meaningfully changes the way we conceive of the timing of the contemporary black diaspora and, in turn, transforms diaspora as an analytical and critical category usually based on normative geography. Kay, though, does not present a world or time in opposition to these orders but in proximity to them—as race also and always disturbs geographic and intimate routes. As “Wax” and my focus on timing suggests, music embodies this subtle shift, offering complete yet portable objects that are meant to invoke a range of affective responses. Bessie Smith violates “time and place” just as surely as Kay’s own engagement with the black diaspora does, offering up mobility, with musicality offering a flexible construction of identity for the performer and the audience alike (Frith 1996, 108–9). Speaking of Kay’s “textual journey” with Bessie Smith in a larger article about Trumpet, critic Carla Rodríguez González argues that Kay employs “biographical improvisation” akin to jazz performance, “adopting” Smith to “mark the continuity of a cultural line where conscious identification becomes a powerful instrument to subvert traditional identities” (2007, 89).26 The larger question looms of how we are to chart, preserve, or even create narratives of these new and difficult diasporas. If these forms are circulating outside of Harlem’s scope, can we imagine a looser archive, one not so tightly bound to a live and exact time and space? Kay finds just that in her constant use of an imaginary black cultural past not completely wed to historical or national correspondences. The “jar of Harlem

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night air” that emblematizes Bessie Smith’s legacy, the container for the floating remains of these tales, can, like music, maintain diasporic connections as material and as itinerant as the traveling done by Harlem artists and intellectuals themselves. The text’s focus on place and travel in the blues seems to argue against a direct correspondence, hence why Kay qualifies the identification as an approximation. Even as Trixie Smith’s opening lyric to this book suggests a “real” gendered split, the music as object is always already straying, imaginatively taking Kay to a set of narrative locations that are not immediately or locally “real”: The names of the blues songs transported me places, created scenes and visions. . . . Each name was enough to make up a story. That’s what I liked about the blues, they told stories. The opposite of fairytales; these were grimy, real, appalling tragedies. There were people dying in the blues; people coming back to haunt the people who were living in the blues; there were bad men in the blues; there were wild women in the blues. People traveled places, or wished they were someplace else in the blues. Could I be a St. Louis Gal? Or could I be Tillie? Might Chicago be a place I would go when I grew up? (1997, 10) Kay immediately links blues to a sort of imagining of a future but also to an imagining of the possibilities of identification with other people (“Could I be Tillie?”), where, again, the blues blur the boundaries of “real” space and bodies. Likewise, the passage also suggests that what is important is not just “real traveling” but also the desire to imagine otherwise and other worlds. What draws the speaker to the blues is the ability to imaginatively travel, and what draws Kay to Bessie as an adult is to imaginatively re-create a queer history of black international practice and identification. In talking about Bessie’s performance, Kay’s “I” says, “When she sings on stage, part of her is travelling, reaching back into every hurt that’s ever happened” (43). Again, Kay has Smith reordering time in her performance—the time of herself and the time of her audience—linking the reader/listener not just to the ineffable pain of slavery and colonialism but to nonchronological queer and feminist desires and losses. Throughout Bessie Smith, “timing” is repeatedly named as Smith’s performative gift and is coupled with the narrative’s insistence on the “prophetic” (1997, 48) nature of Smith’s lyrical and biographical “promiscuity” (80); it can also be identified as the province of critical diasporic

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reception. Kay imaginatively renegotiates the circulation of Black Atlantic culture in the following scene between Bessie and Ruby: But when I’m in the corridor, I hear her start up again, softly, this time singing, “St Louis Gal, Look what you done, done,” and I go back in and she’s wearing my dress and she’s dancing, swaying side to side like I do. I go up to her and I hold her hips and she takes me into her dance and I kiss her. It’s the first time I have ever kissed her. I don’t think I have ever had a kiss like it in my life. We lost all time in that kiss. We was dreaming, slow and soft. Her lips full and wet, moving with me, tracing my lips, finding my tongue. It was all so slow, so slow. We could have become something else in that kiss. I forgot the room, and where I was. I closed my eyes. I don’t usually close my eyes, but the one time I ever kissed Ruby Walker, I closed my eyes. It was like kissing myself. (86) Here, it is the musical performance rather than the visual that conjures up a sexual encounter (Bessie returns when she hears Ruby sing her song after Bessie pulls her hair). Hooked by the song, Kay’s Bessie recognizes Ruby within a “lost time,” a reordering, in which queer desire between black women becomes out of time, much as Kay’s own forced reimagining of an exchange between the two women has to occur out of “real” or documentable time. This is akin to the future-time of the found trunk, when Smith’s recording of a “lesbian” blues song “will outsell anyone else’s, including kd lang” (58). Queer desire, rendered unrecordable, unwritable, unmemorable, and unremarkable within mainstream narratives of diaspora, travels piecemeal across Kay’s text, intersecting with an insistent and competing narrative desire to see the self as a familiar subject. Here is both the trauma and pleasure of recovery projects, in which exploitation and iconography afford an uneasy mobility for Smith’s marginal, innovative version of the feminist diasporic subject and Kay’s queering of that subject. Blues, for Kay’s text, are communicating something perhaps different to the audience other than just a straight read of the lyrics, and that difference, too, is about a future time: “Her blues were like secrets, or shocking bits of news” (Kay, “The Right Season,” in Other Lovers [1993], 11). Here, Kay is arguing for a different mode of circulation in which that secret desire itself gets transmitted through the music to the listener, out of joint with the received meaning. This listening does not so much collapse difference as it expands the possibilities for conceiving legible diaspora experience of gender and sexuality beyond direct lyrical reference.

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Queer time is conjured as a musical, nonliteral mixing, as Bessie’s song transmits desire across subjects as a pliable and extraverbal exchange, available for a recombinant taking up rather than retaining a static value in the public culture market. Kay plays with the idea of queer exchanges of diaspora experience by foregrounding a reordering of time. She identifies Bessie Smith as a queer icon not just in her profile but also in her poetry series on Smith in Other Lovers: “a woman’s memory paced centuries, / down and down, a blue song in the beat of her heart” (“Even the Trees” [1993], 9). The circulation not just of musical objects but also of songs and myths of performances, interactions, and exchanges becomes historical and deeply personal regarding racial difference. The poem concludes, “Everything that’s happened once could happen again” (9). The queer time which Kay maps is repetitive and returning, “pacing” time as well as constantly questioning the way that reception happens and is forgotten and is picked up again, precisely because of the research and back work that Kay has to do to remap Smith’s networks of desire. What draws Kay’s text to the blues is their ability to imaginatively travel while also tracing alternate genealogies for diaspora, linking the reader and listener to the documented history of slavery and colonialism as well as the silences and desires created and sustained culturally through repeated aesthetic performances. Kay imagines black diaspora’s aesthetic relationship to time through Smith’s performative style: She knows the timing. She’s got the timing just right. Doesn’t need to articulate it or even to think about it. It’s all in the length of her pause. It’s the way she hangs on to those notes when they are gone. . . . She is full of longing, full of trouble, restless, wandering up and down the long arms of the clock. When she sings on stage, part of her is travelling, reaching back into every hurt that’s ever happened. (1997, 43) Like the jar of Harlem night air, Smith’s voice and her subjectivity (“She is full”), as signs, are “full of” the stuff of the blues—equal parts “longing” and “trouble,” desire and conflict. Smith is now located not just on the space of the “stage” but inside the “clock,” pacing time itself. Aesthetic practice and product, for Kay, is what “travels,” not just across space but through time, speaking to a range of desires never imagined by more traditional definitions of black diaspora identity. Returning to the lyric which opens this chapter, Kay wonders in print at the literal meaning of the abstract “world” and “jug” metaphor,

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eventually settling on the unsettled aesthetic meaning of the blues, perpetually “open to interpretation” for Kay (1997, 49). But the complicated legacy of the blues rides on more than just a temporal and textual openness. Their timing is instead participatory and contingent on that participation: “They let you enter with your imagination and participate in the conflict” (119). More than just time traveling to the past and back, Kay imagines diasporic reception as the hang, the pause, the repetition of lyrics in a single song, again and again—the repeat of the same route but also of the form of the cultural artifact that can be passed and repeated at will, like Smith’s record in Kay’s childhood home. The politics of Bessie Smith, as both a sign and practitioner of diaspora studies in Kay’s formulation, are as much past as future oriented. Locke’s own formulation of Harlem as “prophetic” suggests that the future is never far from the surface of many of our formulations of race, gender, and diaspora politics, building “temples for tomorrow,” establishing ritual and repetition for a time that has yet to come.27 “Futurity” is a principal construction of diaspora and its imaginative possibilities in the critical work of the feminist aesthetics outlined earlier. In addition to the persistent and thoughtful examination of the past, Kay’s text consistently imagines a world of meaning beyond historical and national time and even beyond death. It is in this time, finally, that the significance of the jar as a different kind of signifier for diaspora circulation comes into its own, specific power. As you will recall, Kay evokes the jar as one in a long list of significant artifacts that she imagines populating that lost “trunk” of Bessie Smith’s personal and professional effects. As one possibility among many, including documentary and material evidence such as photographs, diaries, and even fashion, the jar stands out as a strictly romantic gesture; its very impossibility as a proper vessel of preservation is in fact what characterizes it as noteworthy. In its failure to actually contain “Harlem” as a historical moment, the “jar of Harlem night air” still seeks to give shape to the imaginary legacy of Harlem’s night work. For Bessie Smith, the “world” is no doubt an enormous, impersonal reference. The jar, though, occupies the space of the everyday. It stands as delicate and, compared to the weight of “the jug,” suggests an intimacy between the critical world and the unpredictable resonances of cultural production that history alone cannot account for in total. Both typical and prophetic, ordinary and exceptional, the jar allows experience at the margins of the black diaspora to be transported across surprising times and spaces. The “stopper”—here the lid—keys us into uneven practices of use, the aesthetic and intellectual choices we make (and that have

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been made for us) of when and how much to dispense the imaginary properties of gender and sexual “difference” when confronting the black diaspora. This critical timing is more than just representative, more than letting women’s, working-class, and queer voices into our construction of black transnationalism from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It fundamentally alters our conception of intellectual practice and genealogy through its difference, its chronology. Kay, with her anecdotal relationship to world history and through her private circulation and reception of black cultures, offers a differential time scale against the epic historicity of public discourse. Containing not just surprising geographic movement but a disturbed chronology of black reception, Kay’s profile suggests a repetitive, looped version of diaspora in the form of “wax”—in the traveling objects, images, and sounds of Bessie Smith that become unaccounted for in archives. These gendered traces are more than exceptional, as they permeate the interior of cultural life more than perhaps any other intellectual form. There they threaten to linger in the space of the private, on a turntable or moved from house to house. This is a difficult diaspora, one that asks us to rethink our scale of significance and our lingering attachments to origin and traceability. But the tradeoff does not have to lose specificity as much as it critically asks us for more of it. To read Jackie Kay’s Bessie Smith as a diasporic intellectual profile, a document that characterizes queer and feminist politics at its center rather than its margin, is to recognize that diaspora is more radical, and more tenacious, than we ever thought it could be. The timing of Kay and Smith’s jar contains the possibility to alter the past and future locations of diaspora studies’ known world. In the next chapter, I examine what happens when two poets consider the “known” world of black women, and black women’s bodies, as objects of study in the contemporary diaspora—riffing on C. L. R. James and following Jackie Kay’s work, they try to find a future in the past. What else can be said of the narratives of overexposure and exploitation of these bodies of history? Should they only be considered casualties of cosmopolitanism based on their tragic trajectories, or can the spare but exacting genre of the contemporary lyric give their circulations new meaning, as Jackie Kay repurposes Bessie Smith?

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It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body

She never went into battle armed like the rest, but received the bullets of the enemy that were aimed at her, and returned them with fatal effect, in a manner of which decency forbids a nearer description. —herbert thomas, Untrodden Jamaica (1890) I longed for lovers or children or invented dreams to fill the hollow sleepless nights (the pumpkin seeds that overnight bore fruit to feed us was one, the bullets that I caught between mi legs and threw back at the enemy was another) —honor ford-smith, “A Message from Ni” (1996)

Jamaica’s mythic folkhero Nanny of the Maroons—famed for a story of catching colonial bullets in her bottom and, as described in the first epigraph, returning that fire—stands as a contemporary postcolonial and national hero through this fabulist, if indecent, narrative. The fantastic nature of her story lies in the apparent ridiculousness of its site, its centering on the magical bottom of Nanny. Nanny’s “notorious” bottom produces her as a public and political icon, allowing her to enter into the discourse of local, official, and transnational histories.1 This chapter argues that this material and narrative bottom has come to embody the range of possibilities for black women as cultural figures and producers, even as it accents the necessary limits of that range of representation; as one of the few visible woman “heroes” of the postcolonial struggle, Nanny’s historic success points to the presence of multiple diasporic failures to consider black women as political agents, particularly apart from

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their spectacularized bodies and sexuality. Like Jackie Kay’s recasting of Bessie Smith—the heir apparent to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom2—Honor Ford-Smith represents Nanny’s body as both hopelessly in the “past” and constantly signaling toward “a future / I could not vision” (1996, 15). The “bottom” stands, then, as a familiar place for the discourse of and on black women’s representation. But as populated as it is, it remains an isolating and even exceptional experience to reference, beyond “nearer description,” in Jamaican constable-turned-travel-writer Herbert Thomas’s 1890 words. This double signification of physical bottoms acts as the sign of both success and excess for black women’s cultural significance, the vehicle by which black women as icons are made visible and rendered fantastic and tragic simultaneously in the lineage of Western representation. In what Difficult Diasporas attempts to theorize, lament for the loss of “real,” and hence “ideal,” models for uplift and respectability across the black diaspora are telling, if limited, scripts to entertain the function of black women’s sexuality in popular historical discourse. Starting at the “bottom” can do more than account for exploitation or its converse celebration—of bodies or of the capital gains and losses that the bottom may mark. The previous chapter explored queer and feminist displacements of diaspora genealogies of location through mixed generic form. This chapter explores the complex relationship between the longing for nonexploitative historical visibility of black women’s bodies and the poetics of diaspora representation—and critical reception of that representation—that codes race and gender into their corporeal presences. These competing but interrelated desires demand, in the work of contemporary poets Elizabeth Alexander and Deborah Richards, the invention of aesthetic practices that can account for both impulses. Their work employs a poetics of the body, strategies of reference which explore the “bottom” as a rich if dangerous terrain for remembering black women’s public cultural histories, whether it is in a repurposed modernist tradition of interior monologue in the voice of Saartjie Baartman, a.k.a. the Venus Hottentot, or in a series of long poems using the nonnarrative structure of tables, text boxes, and quotations as references to black cinema star Dorothy Dandridge. Through an innovative poetics of representation, and of referencing the “unseemly” bodies of black women’s representative and performative histories, Alexander’s and Richards’s texts disrupt the epistemological practices that have grounded mainstream critical discourse about black culture and history in the latter half of the twentieth century. The

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bottom, as both the flesh (the material locus of nineteenth-century racial and gendered difference)3 and taboo (the reference itself unspeakable or outside recognizable social limits and cultural imagination), acts as the most compelling organizing cite for Alexander and Richards to negotiate the form and the content of black women’s cultural (dis)appearances from both official and unofficial memory. In the breadth of their work, they reference bottoms to signify both range and limitation, the examples of the exceptions to the “rules” of racialized and gendered representation across the transhistorical diaspora. Poetic form, with its currency in signifying interiority and moving away from sites of narrative history, allows them to navigate this difficult territory without merely falling into the teleology of the bottom. This chapter uses the metaphor of the bottom to reference three levels of critical engagement: first, the emphasis on black women’s bodies and sexuality as the central site of their subject formation in Western modernity; second, the narrative of black experience which takes as its poles exploitation and respectability, or exploitation and resistance, as the clear and opposing options for reading these public histories; and third, the critical discourse which relegates certain black women writers, particularly those deemed “formally innovative” within a postmodern framework, to the margins of visibility and, as such, the margins of “authentic” black culture. In Alexander’s and Richards’s differently accessible poetics, one of modernist legibility and one of radical literacy, the two writers engage the “bottoms” of the Black Atlantic, its uneven historical borders and interdisciplinary methodologies, not to mention its complex geographic routes. Referencing the persistent global circulation of these bottom-dwelling contexts offers, in the work of these contemporary authors, new critical and aesthetic practices of reading race and gender in a genealogy of cosmopolitan desire and discourse. To make the metaphor more direct, this chapter considers diaspora as bottom—as that visceral plane of traumatized flesh and as the lyric category that threatens to contain too much meaning, from too many sources. Like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Nanny’s mythic weapon of colonial resistance, diaspora always acts as a distinct site and moving target, circulating outside of its purportedly “fixed” historical trajectory, even of assumptions about the very history of black women’s bottoms, usually traced back solely to the display of the Venus Hottentot. Alexander and Richards attempt to perform this tricky genealogy, one that both is documentable and exceeds the archival frame, in their own version of “difficult diasporas.” Following on Ian Baucom’s suggestion of a politics

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of cosmopolitan “interestedness” that exposes and charts the myth of reciprocity, their poetic practices attempt “to recover . . . the negative, the singular, the exceptional, or the evident not as a sort of lost foundation but as something that emerges on the far side, and in consequence of, the dialectical operation, a relational poetics, or the act of setting to work” (2005, 232, 229). As Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo argues about the fraught terrain of black cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “people of African descent’s approaches to public self-representation were born, in significant part, of the Atlantic power structure’s attempts to deny them access to cosmopolitan subjectivity,” which she defines as “the definition of oneself through the world beyond ones own origins” (2005, 10, 9). Kwame Anthony Appiah further defines cosmopolitanism as “the idea that we have obligations to others” with whom we share no direct familial or national ties as well as the respectful acknowledgment of our particular difference from those same “others” (2007, xv). Far from fearing the too-capacious object of a burgeoning diaspora studies, Alexander’s and Richards’s poetry recasts these challenges and tensions in iconic, isolated figures, figuring a critical “loneliness” and lone-ness as both myth and method. This aesthetic unevenness pushes the incommensurability between origin and the physical and emotional impossibility of locating any pure original source. Alexander and Richards reflect on this constant tension through a cosmopolitan poetics, exhibiting the vast variety and incompleteness that shadows diaspora and its critical narratives of gender. Alexander’s and Richards’s (and Ford-Smith’s) critiques of the burdens of representation shift against the growing order of their forms or, as Meta Jones so aptly terms it in referencing Alexander’s poetics, against both poets’ practices of “syntactical restraint” (2011, 108). This poetic form mirrors the “narrative restraint” that Saidiya Hartman both performs and calls for in taking up subjected black bodies—in particular the body of the Venus Hottentot—as the subject of history (2008, 12). Such a tactic again invites the move to “a discourse on black alterity. . . . This discourse of ‘other blackness’ (rather than ‘black otherness’) has recently begun to move into a larger discussion of multiplicity and dissonance— the flip side of unity or homogeneity—of African American cultures and identities” (Mullen 2012, 68). What Harryette Mullen marks as poetic “dissonance”—the musical emission of hybridity or hybrid bodies of text—is the ordered, conscious, purposeful, and yet disordered body that Alexander’s and Richards’s cosmopolitan poetics come to represent—as

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breaks with what had been subsumed under the rubric of the “real,” what has limited the genealogical lines available to construct black identity in the face of divergences and differences such as location, education, class status, sexuality, or other “somatic presence[s] of alterity” floating in the world of blackness that they map (H. Young 2006, 16). The strategy for both poets is to claim the full stakes of representation “within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the other—[these two senses of representation] are related but irreducibly discontinuous” (Spivak 1988, 275), not through history but through poetry. Representation here references, both directly and indirectly, a genealogy of black women’s performative bodies, “bottoms” which are/have been disciplined by colonial history. But then there is also the body of text itself (not mutually exclusive from reference but different nonetheless), the structure of the poetry, the form it adopts, which acts as a historiography, an education which may not look like pedagogy, history, or genealogy. In this, the (poetic) body “as a form of memory is also a difficult thing,” as Hershini Young articulates in her study of diaspora women’s novels, and also an aesthetic thing (2006, 6). Alexander and Richards read race and sexuality into a history of the aesthetically generative sites of poetic reeducation, keenly aware that the difficult poetic work is to recognize the great variance and simultaneity that the black body claims as its historical and cultural geography. As Honor Ford-Smith’s contemporary version of Nanny/“Ni’s” bottom suggests, this chapter also critiques attempts to move from the burden of visibility to a space of subjective interiority. In Ford-Smith’s imaginative rendering, poetics allow Nanny to both acknowledge and dismantle the narratives surrounding her historical tops and bottoms, engaging in a discourse of loneliness or longing for recognizable interaction with and in social and cultural narratives—“lovers or children or invented dreams”—to characterize this ambivalent critique. In taking up iconic cultural figures and forms, Alexander and Richards also take on this other “burden” of giving voice to the consciousness of their subjects. Both choose to expose this practice of representing interiority as an equally tempting and problematic surface, a narrative practice no less “invented” than colonialist representations of black women. As Jenny Sharpe articulates in her discussion of Nanny, to study iconic black women is a “paradox,” in that they are “the most prominent” but “also the most invisible in the archives” (2003, 1). Official narratives and historical records compete with oral tradition and post-Independence

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and Civil Rights referents. As several modern critics of race and aesthetics note, the two need not compete for “good” representations of black women’s bodies: Janell Hobson (2005) locates both ongoing trauma and aesthetic revaluing in the legacy of Baartman, for instance, while scholar Meta Jones sees an impulse in contemporary black women’s writing to “engage[] in a subversive revision of the black literary tradition” (2011, 7), adopting and remixing history simultaneously. Ford-Smith’s “Message from Ni” dramatizes this tension between narrative play and corporeal historical materialism, indicating that “surface,” like “bottom,” need not be read as irrelevant, negative, or something to get beyond/over but instead may be read as a critical space to inhabit. This chapter reads the formally challenging poetics of Alexander and Richards as attending to the gaps between the transmissions of history and memory in the black diaspora through the interactions between consequential bodies and the surfaces—the images, sounds, and texts—in which black women’s bodies are frequently and publicly remembered.

Bottoms Up(lift)! The general “problem” of (late-capital) practices of reference is one of correspondence, between the linguistic sign and “any actual object,” as Linda Hutcheon articulates (1988, 143–44). But what can we make of poet Elizabeth Alexander’s use of diasporic reference, her postmodern recasting of nineteenth-century performer Saartjie Baartman, “The Venus Hottentot,” and her infamous bottom: “in this newspaper lithograph / my buttocks are shown swollen / and luminous as a planet” (1990, 5)? The surface of Alexander’s poem could be read as a correction of the referent or, at the very least, the reproduction of the shock of racial and sexual exploitation to right the historical representation—marked by the date in the poem’s full title, “The Venus Hottentot (1825).” But in choosing a date nearly ten years after Baartman’s documented death, Alexander’s referential world grows beyond the discipline of chronological history, into the realm of the posthumous power which references to race, gender, and sexuality signify. As the lines just quoted demonstrate, these excesses of historical reference include those circulated by print and empirical culture. And though Alexander’s poem speaks to modes of resistance, it dwells most frequently in lyric engagement with and in the bottom. If Baartman is a science experiment, she figures on a large scale; her most famous referent, her bottom, metaphorically corresponds to a poetic world of value unto itself, one infused with narratives of shame

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and inferiority as well as intellectual curiosity and cosmopolitan desires of and for diaspora engagement.4 Alexander’s iconoclastic method traces what critic Joseph Roach calls “genealogies of performance” (1996, 25) that engage in ongoing public histories and collective memory to garner and disrupt social power dynamics. From Ford-Smith’s imagined “children” to Alexander’s “imaginary / daughters,” the genealogy of the bottom contains a progressive promise not just of/for material or remembered bodies but for performances of the social imagination itself. As several transnational feminist theorists contemporary with Alexander have also marked, these imaginative progeny signify the relational quality of “histories” and representation. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (1997) name these convergences “feminist genealogies” and mark their “dislocations” as well as their diaspora presences. Connections between popular performances marked by the nexus of gender and race are not just “covered” but rewritten into the lineage of the aesthetic and intellectual practices of a diaspora feminism. Such acts of genealogical engagement occupy a type of spatial relationship to Alexander’s poetics. As a critical frame, genealogy offers within the structure of “reproductivity,” or exhaustive knowledge of documented heterosexuality and inheritance that excluded blacks in the New World, a set of deconstructive acts in its quest for thoroughness, its inevitable uncovering and description of the bottoms of “illegitimate” diaspora connection (Mirza 1997, 5). In Alexander’s taking up of Baartman, she imagines the failures of colonial imagination in the construction of racial difference, the “bottoms” of Western racial discourse. “Bottom” implies hierarchy, a play of power not lost on Alexander, or on Joseph Roach in his formulation of the concept of genealogies of performance, which finds its roots in Foucault: “Genealogies of performance attend not only to ‘the body,’ as Foucault suggests, but also to bodies—to the reciprocal reflections they make on one another’s surfaces as they foreground their capacities for interaction” (1996, 25). Roach goes on to suggest that the concept can “also attend to ‘counter-memories,’ or the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (26). Alexander’s work is instructive, then, in the same way that the bottom’s value itself operates—not as a site of reproduction but as a near reference to sex itself, in both proximity to primary sex characteristics and the site/sight of desire. As such, referencing the bottom points to its capacity as a recognizable sign. Its “vulgarity,” or its obviousness,

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aligns with what Carolyn Cooper recasts as a literacy of the body, a text of “popular taste” (1995, 5). To claim the bottom, for Alexander, is not just to claim the significance of working-class culture but to stage the kinesthetic “performance intelligence” of hypervisible bodies as “a graphic metaphor for alternative aesthetics” (Chatterjea 2004, 24, 19)—as a reference to both the training and typology that characterize the relationship between diaspora political consciousness and aesthetic practices. How those aesthetics are read by critics and by varying audiences is Alexander’s imagined classroom scenario, “swarming with cabbage-smelling / citizens who stare and query, / ‘Is it muscle? Bone? Or fat?’” (1990, 5). The bottom, too, has its interiority, inextricable from its materiality in Alexander’s rendering. The diasporic practices of representation employed by her poetry engage what Hutcheon calls “the yearning for order” not to find, finally, correspondence but instead to map the inquiry into race, gender, and diaspora itself (1988, 157). Rather than the “dominant markers” of self and other, “leaving and arriving,” that Sneja Gunew claims as the false idols of diaspora practice, the referencing of the bottom engages in “an endless process of traveling and change” (2004, 107). Elizabeth Alexander’s body of work challenges, through various levels of engagement with black diaspora culture, a “limited imagination” of iconic figures, local cultures, and familial drama usually associated with blackness and its public circulation (2004, x). These contested signs of blackness, gender, location, and desire become unruly yet highly conscious formal strategies that remap the multiple lines of subjectivity made possible in the histories of black women’s textual and corporeal embodiment. Alexander, as compared to many of the authors discussed in Difficult Diasporas, is not a radically formally innovative poet. She is, however, a part of “recent black poetry that has been enabled by theoretical discourse and avant-garde practices” (Mullen 2012, 69). So while her bodies of text are on the borders of the recognizable (“accessible”), these boundaries are nonetheless stretched with a range of challenging “incorporations” that we might identify as the “intertwining of abstraction and representational modalities, . . . impressing the sheer impossibility of making such monumental histories of suffering intelligible much less legible” (Miranda and Spencer 2009, 923). Sitting on the cusp of what Elisabeth Frost refers to as “hybrid avant-garde poetics” (2003, xxvii), Alexander can be framed not just in terms of what she works out in specific reference or debts but also her formal strategies. “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” finds itself at the axis of redress, or what Saidiya Hartman identifies as a practice

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of “counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility” (1997, 51). The poem’s cosmopolitan redress explores “the import of the performative, . . . the articulation of needs and desires that radically call into question the order of power and its production of ‘cultural intelligibility’ or ‘legible bodies’” (ibid., 56). Thus, Alexander is comfortable with the assertion “that the question was never ‘either/or’: either form or content, either black or avant-garde,” as well as being even more directly and playfully committed to challenging the discrete literacies that are assigned “as part and parcel of ‘identity,’ . . . pigeonholed by particular expectations for form and content” (Schultz 2001). Poetic genealogy, as such, marks Alexander’s practices as innovative within a frame of recognizability: postmodernism with social memory, ludic performances of political reference. Alexander uses strategic reference, or the logic of naming, to cast a wide net in terms of what gets assigned meaning in her work, via references in poetry. Alexander’s texts join the ranks of those which are “fostering both cultural and formal hybridity to demonstrate the ‘mongrel’ nature of contemporary culture and avant-gardism itself, . . . seek[ing] a diverse lineage of its own” (Frost 2003, 138). The logic of naming, of invoking the proper (and improper) objects of diasporic black cultures, does the complex work of genealogy in that it attempts to syncretize multiple and various “lines” of black cultures through the nexus of Baartman’s legacy. Such a task is necessary to revaluing the curriculum—in the sense of an epistemological program— of Black Atlantic public culture and aesthetics. Elizabeth Alexander’s wide sense and command of history opens up this theory of genealogical interrogation; Michel Foucault poses genealogy as a practice of history which, like Alexander’s work, depends on abundance of reference material: Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its “cyclopean monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method”; they cannot be the product of “large and well-meaning errors.” In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins.” (1977, 140)

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Foucault’s “relentless erudition” seems gracefully taken up in Alexander’s own poetic practice, which examines the remainders and underpinnings of other historical methodologies, in particular those which produce “large errors.” Her work on the representations of disparate cultural spheres collected in her texts similarly neither seeks blind progress narratives nor works backward to locate any authentic source of black aesthetic and/or culture. Instead, her genealogies are spatial in terms of relationships to history and audience, thinking broadly about who and where constitutes blackness, and the surprising relations of race and cultural expression. Alexander’s work on Baartman embodies, then, what critic Angela Davis classifies as the three spheres of revision to black subjectivity and culture postslavery in the United States: travel, sexuality, and education (1998, 4). Such a revision comes in the form of “collective” culture for Davis and for Alexander. Alexander, speaking of her play Diva Studies in Callaloo, performs her knowledge of the politics of audience: I think certainly the person who would really get everything in the play is going to be someone who is more or less like me in that they would have an education that is not just a school education but an eclectic education that knows a lot about and revels in black culture and black so-called high culture as well as black vernacular culture, both of those working in an amalgam. So I think that’s who is going to pick up the most from the play. (Alexander, in Phillip 1996, 501) Instead of lamenting the narrowness of who can “pick up” the quick and multiple references of her work, Alexander seems to have a spatial sense of readership, one which is about capacity but not totality. Reference is not meant to alienate but to spread, to educate, but not in a formal or patronizingly instructive way. Instead, Alexander takes herself as an example of a visible, nonsilent subject, assuming the existence and audience of other black cosmopolitan women who could be imagined readers of her work without denying its class-selective breadth. “The Venus Hottentot (1825),” the opening and eponymous poem of Alexander’s first collection (1990), is similarly invested in this lineage of reference, which is of and for, though not limited to, a cosmopolitan construction of diaspora feminism. The first thing one notices, before the poem itself, is the book’s original cover. If the reader does not “know” the referent, does not know who “Venus Hottentot” is historically, the cover offers the reproduction of a painting of a light-skinned black woman, dressed in modern-day black with an abstract formal quality (i.e., the

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body is not quite “realistically” drawn or proportioned).5 The back cover tells us that the painting is actually from the collection of Alexander’s parents themselves, and its artist, Charles Alston, was a well-known African American artist during the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts movement. The back blurb, too, asserts that her work “contributes something new to African-American poetry,” self-consciously situating the book as both part of a recognizable cultural genealogy and an “innovation.” Like the Venus Hottentot, the text becomes both exception and example. If the reader does know the referent to the title’s historical figure, the cover becomes even more dissonant, as the Venus Hottentot is usually characterized as an extreme body in the nineteenth century, one characterized by “what they [European audiences and scientific experts] regarded as unusual aspects of her physiognomy—her genitalia and buttocks, . . . [which] became the central image of the black female in Europe through the nineteenth century. . . . The black female embodies the notion of uncontrolled sexuality” (Hammonds 1997, 172). In locating the Venus Hottentot as ur-figure in the French national-continental literary imaginary, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting points to the construction of the Hottentot as the “master text on black female sexuality” in the post-Enlightenment West (1999, 17), while Sander Gilman’s analysis is echoed in Hammonds’s statement, emphasizing how the construction of black sexuality defined white women’s sexuality as well (2010, 79). Bernth Lindfors (1996) outlines the historical construction of Baartman as a deeply gendered and racialized icon through the Victorian British press’s emphasis on caricature and visual difference. The racially indeterminate, abstract woman with tiny folded hands, light skin, and all black clothes on the cover of Alexander’s book reads as a counter to the nineteenthcentury visions of Baartman’s sexuality, including the represented body on the publicity poster circa 1814.6 She is the “silent” partner, the middleclass black woman to Hottentot’s primitivist caricature of black women’s sexuality but also to contemporary narratives of reclaimed authenticity that celebrate the audacious presence of the bottom (Hobson 2005, 2). As Nicholas Hudson (2008) points out, the visual economies of race in its modern forms that Baartman embodied were created concurrently with ideals of visual aesthetics themselves in the Victorian era. It is this merging, the high art contemporary black portrait under/in the name of an exploited racial icon from the nineteenth-century black diaspora, which Alexander employs to hybridize and expand the tonal range of race and sexuality—of “human difference,” as scholar Janell Hobson terms the

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turn from racial-sexual pathology (2005, 4)—as well as to acknowledge its discursive limits. To take up Evelynn Hammonds’s genealogy of the Hottentot for a moment, though, Baartman was not just an icon of the “uncontrolled” body—she was the very method of control. Brought to London from Cape Town in 1810, Baartman performed under the draw of nascent sideshow curiosities but also as a “representative” of her racial-sexual identity, marked by her steatopygia, or her supposedly enlarged bottom. Her body was a marker of classification, and her performative value was not because of her anatomy but because of its construction and marketing as being the “common property” of black women. As her recent biographer, Rachel Holmes, articulates, “The success of the Hottentot Venus depended upon a contradiction: Saartjie needed to be perceived as a unique novelty, while absolutely typifying the stereotype of a Hottentot” (2007, 42)—again, exception and example. Anne Fausto-Sterling has traced not just Baartman’s “use” as a racial signifier through comparative anatomy but also other indigenous women featuring in racial typology dating back to the late sixteenth century (2000, 205). More recently, there has been an explosion of work on Baartman through the lens of disability studies (Rosemary Garland Thompson references her as part of the history of display of “othered” bodies in Extraordinary Bodies [1997] and her introduction to Freakery [1996]) and black diaspora studies, both in the realm of her continued visual legacy in drama such as the aforementioned Parks’s Venus and visual artist Renee Cox’s work and in the “return” of her remains to South Africa in 2002 and the subsequent commemoration of her singular legacy in postapartheid South Africa (as noted by critics such as Neville Hoad [2007] and the documentary The Life and Times of Sarah Baartman [1998]). And in 2010, Alexander’s poem prefaced the introduction to Deborah Willis’s edited collection on the legacy of “Venus,” in Black Venus 2010 (2010), the first major anthology work to consider her legacy of representation, from historical, visual, and cultural studies perspectives. As Willis herself notes, much “variation” exists in critical investments and naming of the genealogy of the Venus Hottentot, but as exception and example, she stands with a planetary body of work and reference surrounding her.7 Alexander’s poem itself, “The Venus Hottentot (1825),” is divided into two sections which come to represent this collective cultural impulse to recover lost history and to question that historical representation in any and all of its forms—much as the 2008 Crais and Scully biography suggests in its title: Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story

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and a Biography. The first section is entitled “Cuvier,” the last name of the French scientist who circulated and did experiments on Baartman, and it tracks the known world, the “biography,” of whom we can only know as a performance through the archive, the Venus Hottentot: Science, science, science! Everything is beautiful blown up beneath my glass. Colors dazzle insect wings. A drop of water swirls like marble. Ordinary crumbs become stalactites set in perfect angles of geometry I’d thought impossible. Few will ever see what I see through this microscope. Cranial measurements crowd my notebook pages, and I am moving closer, close to how these numbers signify aspects of national character. Her genitalia will float inside a labeled pickling jar in the Musée de l’Homme on a shelf above Broca’s brain: “The Venus Hottentot.” Elegant facts await me. Small things in this world are mine. (1990, 3–4) It is a short section, in the first person, with couplet lines that enjamb themselves, giving the effect of strain or a failing order. The “Cuvier” section lays out a particularly contained narrative of the genealogy of black

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women’s bodies; “Science, Science, Science!” the section begins, repeating the frame of reference lest we “miss” it. Cuvier’s narrative is one of objects, “small things” which make up an exacting but completely exterior world. Things are “blown up”—“insect wings,” “cranial measurements,” “genitalia”—things are preserved to be “seen” by Cuvier and by a future viewing public. His genealogy is one of moving “closer” in order to go further, to the museum, and so on. His narrative, as Alexander imagines/constructs it, is one of assigning reference, naming. It is the part, the artifact, which is named, “her genitalia” in a jar given a referent but “her,” the body and subject, left unmade. Of course, Alexander’s reverse act is to name/construct “Cuvier,” to limit him to these contained lines, to a “small” body of ownership, of knowledge, a small lineage (3–4). Her appropriation of his voice takes Alexander’s knowledge and reframes the referent under Hottentot’s name, rather than the conventional genealogy that would locate Cuvier, then Baartman. Alexander’s use of historical detail and multiperspective interior monologue to remake narratives of race and sexuality marks her’s intervention into the patterns of reference that identify Baartman’s meaning, a failing series of parts standing in for what was always a performative, constructed whole or, in Gilman’s words, the “specimen” acting as “pathological summary of the entire individual” (2010, 86). “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” is a critique of taking from the specifics of historical detail a compulsory narrative of gendered and racialized subjectivity, the “tragic case” repeated, imminently and endlessly. If Cuvier’s historiography is relegated to the limits that Alexander imposes on his referents, then her wish to inhabit or rewrite the genealogy of the Venus Hottentot reads as expansive, not as a recovery project for a “ghost,” per se. And indeed, it is not the “fact” of Venus’s bottom, nor scientific discourse alone, that gives the bottom, as sign, its historical and cultural weight: “Bottoms were big in Georgian England,” Baartman biographer Holmes tells us, as was public debate about Baartman’s status as either “slave” or “free agent” in the emerging capital market, one that marked her ability to, for instance, speak several languages as a skill set that implied consent perhaps even more than her corporeal presence did (2007, 43).8 Alexander herself references this move in her Callaloo interview when asked about her interest in Hottentot: Hopefully what the poem gives her also is an intellectual range. When I say intellectual, I don’t mean book stuff but a rich and textured inner life that belies the surface exploitation and

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presentation. I guess that’s what I’m most interested in. It’s a very interesting black-people-character question because our surfaces are so wildly distorted in Western culture. Therefore, to go into the inside, there is all this contrast and distance frequently with how we are seen and who we are inside. (Phillip 1996, 502) Though the rationale sounds perhaps seductively sentimental, notice that Alexander describes her process here not as a corrective measure but as a descriptive one; she, as her Venus Hottentot does in the next section in the poem, is describing the terrain in which she writes on race, gender, and sexuality. The “interior” is the bottom, full of “contrast and distance,” unresolved for her poetic genealogy. Like Alexander’s conception of her audience, her relationship to constructing Saartjie Baartman as reference is a question of narrative capacity or range, not a reproduction of “the illusion of realism” and “mastery” that characterizes nineteenth-century engagement with Baartman or the narrative that locates her as a model of resistance (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 6). Her mapping does not deny even as it seemingly conflicts with surface signs of meaning. Alexander’s poem and the collection it frames contest the constructed conflict between sexuality and intellectual production as a false split between exterior and interior.9 “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” shifts poetic genealogy to questions of moving into rather than moving over to something larger than such “small” objects. It insists not on the sum of their representative parts but on their reclassification, or their re-collection, into different analytical and referential frames which can recognize black women’s material bodies as modes of diaspora intellectual practice, and vice versa (as in the previous chapter’s reconsideration of Bessie Smith through Jackie Kay). As the second section of the poem begins, untitled, we recognize the voice not as Cuvier’s but as that of the Venus Hottentot of the title. The speaking subject is not passively placed but locates herself within London, as a traveling/traveled body, one who is decidedly doing “work,” like Kay’s Bessie Smith, including the intellectual work that Alexander attributes to her in her interview: There is unexpected sun today In London, and the clouds that Most days fit into this cage Where I am working have dispersed. I am a black cutout against a captive blue sky, pivoting

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nude so the paying audience can view my naked buttocks. (1990, 4) This first eight-line stanza, too, offers a containment, but of a different sort. If Alexander’s reference to Cuvier was sparse, direct, and limited, then these expansive stanzas offer a blunt but thoughtful version of histories of display. Hottentot as speaking subject is a theorist, critically reading her surroundings and referencing the visible structures in/of her display: “this cage,” “paying audience,” and so on.10 She is both naming and, as she continues, named, the referent and the one capable of referencing. Her ideological reference point, however, is neither science nor shame, the dominant modes of characterizing black women’s sexuality in the discourses of typology and respectability. The awkward articulation of the word “buttocks” at the end of the stanza marks the turn to official terminology within poetic construction, the wish to codify “where I am working” with a certain halting banality in place of the “double entendre” of “vulgarity” (Cooper 1995, 141).11 For Alexander, it is the labor of reference, as the reader stumbles over the sound and the sign of the bottom, “buttocks,” that is emphasized. It is also the resistant timing of the speech, its specificity—“today”—and its posthumous address, that manages to escape the predetermined narrative of epic tragedy.12 This is the quotidian existence of the cosmopolitan subaltern, the work that representation continually does not just in the lexicon of domination but in the too-quick preoccupations generalized categories in diaspora and transnational feminist studies.13 This ability to read the “surfaces,” distorted though they may be, offers Alexander’s Hottentot a capacity that obviously complicates the narrative of her legacy in Western discourse, on display at the Musée de l’Homme, in parts and jars. (In 1825, she would be posthumously speaking.)14 She, too, can construct lists of “small things,” like Cuvier, things that she would acquire in her diasporic performative work, things that Alexander repossesses to her: I would return to my family A duchess, with watered-silk Dresses and money to grow food, Rouge and powders in glass pots, Silver scissors, a lorgnette, Voile and tulle instead of flax,

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Cerulean blue instead of indigo. My brother would devour sugar-studded nonpareils, pale taffy, damask plums. (1990, 4) This list could continue: a family, a home, an understanding of material, of color, of food. The “small things in this world” are not, of course, for the speaking subject but are part of an unfulfilled narrative of reciprocal desire for cosmopolitan legitimacy (4). Such desire for ownership, these references to commodity culture and the good life, shifts the raced and gendered paradigm by making everything cosmopolitan. This Venus Hottentot assesses not only her given name but those of her sideshow “neighbors,” her own animal-like presentation, as well as her “planet”ary status (5). Baartman is large, in Elizabeth Alexander’s text; she is her own world, her own system of reference, even as she is limited by another set of meanings. As the poem alternates between brief first-person sentences and the logic of lists, a body is produced which is knowledgeable, savvy, and strategic about her knowledge, about giving away further referents, such as her linguistic prowess, her desire for her “mother’s sadza,” her desire for other kinds of performances (6).15 At the threshold of what is only visible, only surface, Alexander’s text creates a rich interior logic, its own genealogical system in which black women’s bodies are not the limits of their subjectivity, the one irretrievable, nonnegotiable thing. Instead, she is “the family entrepreneur!” aware of her place on the market, the price of “uplift,” the role of capital as a daughter of the empire (6).16 Unable to decisively control the market, Hottentot-as-icon turns inward: Since my own genitals are public I have made other parts private. In my silence I possess mouth, larynx, brain, in a single gesture. (6) Moving away from the logic of corporeal form, Alexander suggests that speech—and intellectualism—are embodied as well in the controlled “gesture” of silence. Speech and silence are both part of “Saartjie’s arsenal of engagement,” as well as integrated into narratives of her subjugation (Holmes 2007, 42). They are the postcolonial “possessions” of the subaltern, with Alexander pulling back “the veil of skin,” or the biopolitics of colonial classification and contemporary racial thought, to dissect the

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worlds of fame, shame, and race that occlude critical analysis of history (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 27). Never letting the text break from its formal constraints except within the length of the lines themselves, Alexander keeps her eye on the restraints on Hottentot’s subjective and material body—what Hammonds refers to as the “problematic of Silence” surrounding black women’s presence in historical, cultural, and academic records (1997, 170)—at the same time as she allows room for a counterexpression of desire, not just to return but to enact a whole other lineage, not that of “Broca’s brain” or “her genitalia” but of “his [Cuvier’s] black heart, / . . . geometric, deformed, unnatural” (Alexander 1990, 4, 7). It is scientific racism, sexual abjectification, and colonial histories of display that are “central [to] the management of the living and dead black body” which get referenced back out, in the end, from Alexander’s text (Miranda and Spencer 2009, 927); it is these public histories which constitute “the bottom” of representation but also an occasion for new intellectual-critical practices of reading those strategies. The bottom becomes a thick line, as it were, between coercion and consent, the fetishized metaphor for the relationship between speech and the body.17 But discourse, too, is an embodied performance, a pedagogical weapon, and a genealogical reference for Alexander: I rub my hair with lanolin, and pose in profile like a painted Nubian archer, imagining gold leaf woven through my hair, and diamonds. Observe the wordless Odalisque. I have not forgotten my Xhosa clicks. My flexible tongue and healthy mouth bewilder this man with his rotting teeth. (1990, 6) As Baartman performs history and its parody, “bewildering” with her flexibility of representation and meaning, Alexander’s reference privileges the opulence of lyric and the power of the curious object of blackness. Baartman’s bottom is fascinating, captivating within the captivity of a “rotting” empire, emblematized by her autopsy, performed in public by Cuvier. Alexander also forces our identification to work over breaks, from “Nubian” to “archer,” and from the unexpected turn in the last

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three lines of the stanza to the definitive full stop at the genealogical site of Western scientific discourse and its “bewilder(ment)” in the face of difference. The compulsion toward reference and toward that which needs to recur and recirculate with a difference is what drives Alexander’s practice of poetic genealogy. Alexander positions her reference to Hottentot as part of the collective subjectivity of black cosmopolitan subjects (Phillip 1996, 502). We can trace this in the totality of the collection of poems itself; The Venus Hottentot is broken into four untitled sections: the first is composed wholly of “The Venus Hottentot (1825)”; the second contains poems that articulate a personal history, containing memories of the American South and the Supremes; the third thinks through popular history, from Paul Robeson to a Monet painting; the final section contains short lyrics, like the rest of the collection, but this time set in the present day (1990) and considering figures from Muhammad Ali (a future subject in Antebellum Dreambook [2001]) to Nelson Mandela to Lawrence Welk. The sweep of topics, held together by the specter of the Venus Hottentot, encompasses blackness and black history through the widest lens possible, because we know better than anyone that we are not one or ten or ten thousand things Not one poem We could count ourselves forever and never agree on the number, as she writes in “Today’s News” (1990, 51). Her practice of reference expands rather than excludes by claiming moments of what Meta Jones refers to as “unwritten literacy,” a part of a larger legibility, where what is “bourgeois” need not (and cannot) be excised or protected into silence (2002, 96). By offering the difficult flesh of the bottom as, like Nanny, an “invented dream” of black public culture, Alexander cites the black body as part of colonial histories, but not just as the sites of its disciplining.18 Alexander’s radical move is including Venus Hottentot into the fold of middle-class, cosmopolitan black women writers.19 If, as Anne duCille critiques the reception of Harlem Renaissance women writers, “in inventing sophisticated, light-skinned, middle-class heroines, the argument goes, these writers adhered to traditional notions of womanhood and made themselves and their characters slaves to the conventions of

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an ‘alien tradition’” (1993a, 422), what about when the speaking subjects cannot be read as completely foreign or totally conventional? As Holmes reminds us, Baartman was an “illegal immigrant,” albeit a spectacular one, doing the work of the various national and diasporic imaginaries that claim(ed) her (2007, 42, 79). Critic Malin Pereira thinks of Alexander as doing a similar cosmopolitan work with her lyric poetics that “emanate[] outward to the public, historical, and national” (2007, 713). Alexander turns the familiar representation unfamiliar, making the pejorative lineage of black women’s performance as exposure and negative instruction into an act of innovative, cosmopolitan history.

At the Bottom of the World Deborah Richards’s poetry collection Last One Out begins with a poem titled “Beauty Projection,” which references, among other subjects, the celebrity body of the Venus Hottentot. On the second page of the poem “figure 1” appears, and the third page is structured as a table with two columns and two rows. The header row has “Hottentot” and then “Venus” encapsulated by two smaller text boxes, with quoted texts about Venus’s exhibition, in different fonts and emphases, below the “Hottentot” column, and a first-person account of a black woman remembering her youthful trip to Italy in the “Venus” column. The word “ass,” centered, is in its own textbox at the bottom of the page, with the line dividing the above table into columns cutting down to the middle of the first “s” (2003, 13). If my description of Richards’s work seems difficult, her own charting method develops in a similarly complex manner. Centering on the word “ass” itself, “Beauty Projection” uses form to render depth in a radical conjunction of surfaces including the profane—the “ass.”20 If Elizabeth Alexander works from an aesthetics of embodiment, Richards’s move is more lateral or composite, a layering of surfaces that emphasizes accumulation and contradiction. She herself characterizes her form as like a “palimpsest,” or, more tellingly, as “the extensive as well as the intensive” (Rowell 2004, 1008). Richards also uses the metaphor of “ectopic presence,” a writing or subjectivity attached to but on the outside surface of intelligibility or even recognition. “Venus,” “Hottentot,” and “ass,” as frames, then, rest as the ectopic presence of Hottentot’s “beautiful” legacy, boiled down to linguistic bare bones: proper names (traditional marks of reference) and a “representative” body part. The metaphoric spatial body that Richards constructs, then, further extends the curious relationship

figure 2.1. From Deborah Richards’s poem “Beauty Projection,” from the collection Last One Out

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between example and exception which black women’s bodies practice in public memory. Daphne Brooks dubs this position the “eccentric,” a telling companion to Richards’s own ectopic genealogical understanding of how Black Atlantic women’s performances travel—between the United States, Europe, and Africa—as both method and material, and as form and flesh (2006, 6). For Richards’s “Beauty Projection,” the constant, if uneven, frame of Venus and “the bottom” is also a traveling legacy, across cultures, geographies, nations, and histories. “Beauty Projection” is a combination of found texts from different time periods as well as from Richards’s own traveling experiences as a Black British woman around Europe—a geography unexplored in the context of Gilroy’s model, either from the nineteenth century or in the contemporary moment. How does the ineffable map onto the exotic? the poem seems to ask. Hottentot becomes an organizing force, a rubric that offers itself as a precursor to Richards’s form (charts, etc.) in the constant public and scientific dissection of her body and image, despite either her at-homeness in her native Europe or her facility with American cultural normatives surrounding race in the public sphere in the United States. Richards takes the focus on black women’s corporeal form seriously, then, not just by evoking it but by making her own formal strategies the center of how to apprehend her writing. The poem’s focus on the relationship between travel, race, and desire enacts itself in this “strange” form, a word repeated through the piece in varying font sizes and types. Literally, the text defamiliarizes the familiar in its form. Like Alexander, Richards seeks to make strange the connections between disparate but recognizable objects and discourses—of beauty, tourism, science, and history. Reference, in fact, takes on new life and meaning in the poems throughout the book by Richards’s choice of including a bibliography at the end of each cycle, showing her “editor’s” hand (Rowell 2004, 1008). The poem’s emphasis on surface—skin, practices of display, fashion choices, and so on—like the archeology text that Richards cites, moves to excavate links between the visible, to piece together diasporic elements that would otherwise remain disconnected or disarticulated, letting the remaining narratives continue to stand in physical isolation from one another. “Beauty Projection” also emphasizes the pleasure and horror of looking, of being objectified and desired, and reinforces this unevenness through uneven textual practices; the enlarged words which then stand out in her narrative make “more” meaning than others. This privileging pulls out a pattern and forces the reader to confront it, so that the

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repetition of words such as “queer,” “extraordinary,” and “strange” in association with beauty and black women’s publicly displayed bodies is verbally inescapable. Richards’s texts ask what, if anything, can be considered private or unscripted in cultural exchange. In “Parable,” a long poem which discourses on American cinema, she writes about Pinky, the nineteen-forties passing film: that pinky is living in a shack with her grandmother played by ethel waters and everyone can see that waters is black in fact she is known for it in all her films (2003, 35) To be a black woman is to be seen and to be known “for it” and by that racial distinction. Blackness is the epistemological marker, the referent for subjectivity in the visual economy of race. Richards’s concern for how public knowledge and histories are produced though cultural reference, as in the quote from “Parable” about Waters, emphasizes not just the “black” cultural product but also its circulation. Of course, Richards is sure to disrupt the assumed circuits of cultural reception by foregrounding how the cinematic narratives of American blackness do not translate to lived experience—Richards cops to her “miscalculation of American society” as stemming from her “misreading of American mass media” (Rowell 2004, 1002). But she also locates critical potential in such diasporic inequivalencies: “I like thinking that reading the entertainment news is a political act of deciphering the codes. The semiotics of entertainment news is a significant way for me to interpret the United States” (ibid., 1002). This is just the type of “mutual incomprehension” that Brent Edwards (2003a) describes as the condition of diaspora, in perpetual translation (like Richards’s French mistranslations). Richards’s flexible methodology for “reading” America is one of travel or a traveling sensibility. It is travel, particularly cultural traveling, which instead of confirming the presence of a “home” or origin to return to, substantiates the unfamiliar and makes strange assumed connections abroad. It is also what leaves the black body as a referent both hypervisible and inscrutable at the same time, in the way that it is constantly misread as a cultural text. Writing, for Richards, signifies the practice of travel, embodying diaspora as an active mode of “interpreting” national cultures and acting as the means of exchange itself. In fact, black diasporic movement further obscures rather than “opens” referential discourse here: “so I come to America a great place to get busy and keep secrets” (2003, 47). The hypervisibility of race, and particularly of black women, functions as a screen, a set of referents that diverts

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attention from the routes more frequently traveled by black women subjects. Richards’s “Parable” is a lesson learned about the relationships between gender, race, and sexuality in the United States, one that allows and demands a level of silence even in its articulation of romantic narratives of belonging. This, for the poet, is the dual tension of “getting busy” in writing at the same time that such writing is “keeping secrets,” like textual gaps, from those to whom it circulates. The legacy of black American culture and politics to articulations of Black British identity similarly emphasizes this blackness as the venue for “getting busy” on several sexual and political levels. These public histories, pulling on and constructing Black Britishness, do not travel “well” for Richards’s work, but it is the difficulty of their transmission that wins her attention (Rowell 2004, 1000). Like her emphasis on Ethel Waters’s blackness as the method of recognition, Richards reads varying diasporic cultures as both helpful and limited, failing in their ability to accurately reference but in that failure, that lapse or gap of “secrecy,” finding many “busy” racial and sexual exchanges. If “Beauty Projection” and “Parable” both play with a kind of cultural tourism associated with the desire to watch and document the watching of black women’s bodies and bodies of history, then “C’est l’amour: That’s Love” attempts an uneven equivalence in its title to complicate that desire’s articulation in academic criticism, journalism, movies, and popular imagination. The title itself is both sighingly romantic and exhaustively pragmatic, an identifier—“that is love”—and a question: “is this what “love,” or the complex of desire and public duration (and adoration), is, ontologically? As with the two previous pieces from Last One Out, this poem concerns American media, specifically the body and body of work of Dorothy Dandridge. Like the compulsively described “tragic case” of the Venus Hottentot, Dandridge stands in as one of the “bottoms” of black women’s genealogies of performance. Dandridge is categorically documented as a modernized “tragic mulatta” narrative, emphasizing her spectacular rise and disastrous fall from the public eye.21 No less than the critic who wrote the book on cinematic racial types, Donald Bogle, wrote her autobiography (1997), canonizing her referential function in popular and critical cultural memory. As the “tragic” in “tragic mulatta” suggests, the bottom spheres that Dandridge as an icon traffics in are multiple, not contained to just her physical body; narratives surrounding her include financial, romantic, sexual, and social depths, meticulously reported from journalism at the time of her death to Halle Berry’s HBO biopic, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, in 1999.

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In a series of charts and tables, Richards literally showcases this narrative of tragedy, exposure, and extreme travel—from the “tops” of cultural iconography and status to the “bottoms” of falling out of that cultural memory. To the right are a headline and its tag: A Tragically Fallen Star Smoulders in Memory; Hollywood’s Tryst With Dorothy Dandridge Inspires Real Love at Last Janet Maslin New York Times June 19, 1997 Section C; Page 15; Column 2; Cultural Desk (2003, 75) Richards places this section toward the end of the long poem, rather than at the start of the poem, keeping chronologically with a “taking stock” of Dandridge’s cultural value. The language is direct; Dandridge is relegated to “tragically fallen” at the same time that her star status, her icon’s commodity value, is personified as involved in a dynamic romantic exchange. She (as star, as actress) “smoulders” and “inspires”—finally— “real love” in Hollywood cultural memory in 1997 (when bidding rights to her story were ping-ponged between Halle Berry, Janet Jackson, and Whitney Houston).22 The legacy of Dandridge, like that of the tragic mulatta type, is one of perpetual unrequitedness—the narrative-ending love that dare not be consummated, that eats away at the longing body. The constant lack or thwarting of reciprocity between not just Dandridge and commercial success but Dandridge and “the audience,” Dandridge and mainstream American culture, is what makes black women’s bodies “smoulder” on the diasporic scene, coming in and out of visibility, in and out of fashionable memory.23 Ironically, it is that unrequited status which confirms corporeal fate—the ultimate bottom, death. Dandridge becomes her own civilization in her live-to-die-young tragedy, with a “rise and fall” shaped by “racial climate” and suffering from the “worst humiliation contributing to her decline,” falling “victim to bigotry, personal tragedy, and one of Hollywood’s great failures of imagination” (2003, 75). The quoted text that Richards selects echoes Alexander’s world of the Venus Hottentot’s planetary stature, where as a race “star,” literally, Dandridge’s success

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is linked with Brown v. Board of Education. Richards frames discourse on Dandridge in its epic structure, careful to document the hyperbolic language’s specific location—the middle of the Arts section of the New York Times over thirty years after her death. If Dandridge as icon is intricately bound up with the public history of “race relations,” then that history is being lost, recovered, commemorated, and forgotten again in an astounding, and categorical—as Richards’s tables attest—fashion. But to talk about how these bottoms circulate in cultural discourse, how they become victims of “imagination” gone wrong, Richards also theorizes the lure of the posthumous. Categorizing and organizing the failures of black women’s representation, “C’est l’amour” marks the fascination with black women’s deaths and downfalls as the cultural “real love” for intersectional discourse on race and gender. Richards’s text ensures the continued presence and reference in cultural memory; in other words, the tragic narrative becomes a mark of exceptionalism and its racial, gendered, and sexual limits simultaneously. Richards juxtaposes the text of a film critic on Dorothy Dandridge, quoting at the midsection of the text, “Posthumously, the dangerous ambiguity of her image intensified” (2003, 75). Richards’s form is also a kind of intense autopsy, detailed by the (pro)portional, balanced by a splitting down the middle, and enacted by the vexed body of her “tragic” subject.24 Dissected, cultural criticism does not circulate or digest smoothly but rather exposes the price of being publicly re-membered at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. The poem’s focus on the pitfalls and possibilities of amorous iconography constantly references this lack of “wholeness” in form and content, exhibiting instead the leftover, the Derridean remainder of desire, longing, and cultural loneliness that also characterizes the “bottoms” of literary discourse on Nanny and the Venus Hottentot. Richards’s text does more than reenact this lament; it asks what the currency of such loneliness can be. Richards, like Alexander’s turn to the “privacy” of intellectual life in “The Venus Hottentot,” questions the value of the visible. Charles Rowell, in his Callaloo interview with Deborah Richards, suggests that “C’est l’amour” is about the trope of the visible, the “tragic myopic,” as he calls it (2004, 1004); Richards insists that vision itself, its “apparent[ness],” is precisely where meaning cannot be assumed or can be interrupted: “She’s too apparent,” she says of Dandridge (2003, 65). There is a tragedy and a symbolic order to Dandridge’s (over)exposure in “C’est l’amour,” but also a play, a glamour and a sense of the absurd that offers multiple sites for critical intervention. Richards renarrates the Carmen Jones (1954) script

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on which this poem is based through visibility: “She is barely dressed for the war effort in a red skirt and a black gypsy-like blouse. The blouse has lacy detachable sleeves, but more about that later,” the text reads, next to a lengthy blank section (2003, 58).25 Carmen/Dandridge’s entrance and this narration are rendered amusing in the temporariness of the sleeves and the costuming, and the actual “space” given to us to wonder on the “more,” the analysis yet to come. These are the “failures” of the imagination that Richards imagines as significant details for cultural translation. The attempt to identify a singular legacy, one that honors the “appeal” of the visible and its gendered and “racial” limits (signified in the text boxes and charts) is the focus of the random “trivia” table midway through the poem as well (2003, 74). The top row starts each column with “she was,” and each of the middle boxes plays with the words “on” and “off,” the slipperiness of visibility and meaning. The “bottom” row reads as a series of adjectives, in quotation marks, all words that resonate as marks of an unsure legacy of gender trouble, racial ambiguity, and their cultural endurance. Richards’s compulsive referencing of other texts marks her practice as giving visibility not to a subject but to the traces of black women’s subjectivity via the cultural body of a figure like Dandridge, the discursive tendencies that linger. The references also mark her interrogation of race and gender in the hyperbolic terms of its formation through forms of science and from the perspective of someone “outside” particularly American formations of racial narrative—hence her insistence on the cosmopolitan roots of race and representation. Richards’s obsessive accounting for Dandridge’s “bottoms” displays itself most legibly in the facts and, notably, figures at what is perhaps the structural climax of the poem. Five tables span two pages (73–74), one containing “trivia” segmented into three columns that read across rather than down, another containing lyrics and the nonsensical “tra la la” in single-word table boxes, two placed together with film salaries and spousal information running across, and a final table containing “tra la las” and French-to-English lyric translations. The top tables quantify bottomness, from “$2.14 in her back account” to “spouse ‘Jack Danison’ (1959–1962) (divorced) white ‘businessman’ who ruined her” (73). Even “Carmen Jones” is a bottom, figures wise—with her lowest, prestar salary. The juxtaposition of numbers, musical nonsense, classificatory form and practice, the public and the personal—and the way the figures which most credibly circulate are undergirded and confirmed by cultural mistranslation—captures the reinforcement of middle-class normatives across diaspora critical

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figure 2.2. Trivia table from Deborah Richards’s poem “C’est l’amour: That’s Love”

practice that seek to order and distance themselves from Dandridge as bottom. Critic Roderick Ferguson critically aligns this question of mutually dependent economic, racial, and social identities in the context of the twentieth-century black diaspora: “As contemporary globalization polarized minority communities economically, it produced the social conditions whereby class differences could help establish the normative status of racial subjects” (2004, 148). For Richards (and Alexander), the function of capital flows granting middle-class

figure 2.3. Tables from Deborah Richards’s poem, “C’est l’amour: That’s Love”

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subjectivity to blacks is an alternate way of thinking the genealogy of a feminist practice of diaspora—one that is both performative and intellectual. Dandridge’s ultimate failure, then, can be read as a question of numerical authority, or at least it can be traced as such. It approaches the revised referents of diasporic desires for a blackness that fails under the weight of middle-class structures as epistemological subjects— “sites of knowledge,” more than visions of “transgression” that keep the line so firm between legitimate subjects of global states and black political thought, and those who inhabit their discursive, tragic margins (Ferguson 2004, 148). This conceptual quantification of bottomness matches Richards’s compulsive translation and repetition of lyrics, gestures, and the French language. Her play with sound and meaning confounds or disrupts any clean sense of making “sense” of the possibilities and desires of translation in this diaspora narrative. With its “Tra la la” repeating in text boxes down and across the pages of “C’est l’amour,” there is no ordered narrative through which to categorize Dandridge’s tops and bottoms in the end. Even Carmen’s legacy has multiple routes and roots, including the Bizet opera, which Richards also includes excerpts from in French. Her translations appear in separate, sometimes noncorresponding text boxes, again disrupting the order of her form and narrative impulse. The French root that Richards imposes on Dorothy Dandridge as a figure challenges as well a sense of black knowledge production.26 Rather than a base in biography, Dandridge and the poem locate themselves in multiple imaginative spheres, with roots around Europe, around traveling cultural sensibilities, as much as around the trope of travel itself. Even the “tragic mulatta” has an operatic twin or referent, one that is culturally mobile or, as Richards coins it, “the moving referent” of home (Rowell 2004, 1002). Overlap and repetition are significant strategies of available reference in “C’est l’amour,” but so are the gaps and ruptures that the volume of information and the urge to classify maintain. Richards’s reference to Dandridge, in other words, revels in the ectopic again: the details or the fringes of Dandridge as figure, Dandridge as the details at the edge of other cultural referents. Like Alexander’s “The Venus Hottentot (1825),” “C’est l’amour” presumes incompletion and even failure, confounding scales of productivity and reproductivity. “C’est l’amour” arrests ongoing narratives of representation while it remains attached, literally and inevitably, if ambivalently, to them and to the material and ideological significance of the rises and falls of cultural memory.

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Diaspora’s Black Bottom Nanny in Honor Ford-Smith’s poem, like Dorothy Dandridge and Saartjie Baartman in the work of Richards and Alexander, seeks a genre to make her body visible—to make history with it, literally, and to discipline the existing history into something like attention. It claims the importance of reading the bottom and responding to it, putting the bottom into the realm of the imaginative and creative, refusing its relationship to the played-out narratives of martyrs, saints, and sinners. Much like Alexander and Richards, Ford-Smith’s poetics refuse the desire to go “beyond” the bottom, to deny the bottom’s importance by engaging in rigid definitions of black interiority (or even employment and use value). The bottom, instead, becomes a discursively productive and complex site for reading the power dynamics of public histories and black women’s subjectivity and sexualities. The bottom is beauty and lament, limit and excess, a border and the interior. Deborah Richards’s and Elizabeth Alexander’s writing embodies this feminist sense of the necessary bottom, with its potential for not just recovery but transformative use of diasporic histories of raced and gendered representation.27 Their representations are acts of remembering with a difference, postmodern practices met with the sensibility of diaspora movement, where everything and nothing is home, is both strange and available, and is loaded with the weight of public exposure and with private, unknowable longings. Returning to Joseph Roach for a moment, might we think of another birth metaphor, “surrogation,” to characterize the rich impossibilities of this field? Roach suggests that there is an unending performance of both collectively commemorating the “loss” and enacting a replacement of disappearing bodies (in his example, faculty members) that constitutes institutional and community practice; “in the life of a community,” he writes, “the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric” (1996, 2). He goes on to posit that the attempts at “substitution” or finding “alternates,” “rarely if ever succeed[]” (2). For him, this is the root of failed attempts at origin narratives and the like. And perhaps, if we think of his theory in terms of disciplinary practices, we can locate a similar impulse or response within diaspora and transnational feminist studies, one that is often desperately trying to find something to fill the void of the traumas of affiliation by performing criticism that may temporarily “heal” the breaks between cultures and identities. The feminist poetics of Alexander and Richards instead focus

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on mapping the moments of diaspora surrogation themselves. Rather than explorers trying to “find” the alternate way, these authors engage in a critical practice of representation that traces the fragmentation of multiple narratives as source material but not as the source itself. To return to my opening comments about the memory of Jamaica’s Nanny, both Herbert Thomas and Honor Ford-Smith attempt to grapple with the extraordinary legacy of Nanny’s bottom. It is the narrative of her bottom which constructs her as exceptional, as not “like the rest.” But it is also the myth of the bottom which enters her into collective memory and public histories, the genealogy of “invented dreams” that stands next to and against the traditionally gendered domestic narratives of “lovers or children.” This tension between a black gendered subjectivity that has to be at once the lonely exception and then the lasting cultural example of the diasporic group is possibly what Alexander’s and Richards’s feminist writing can offer to diaspora. These formally innovative women writers carry a sense of diaspora that is decidedly “different” in its refusal of a singular use for that organizing concept. Their references, like their formal strategies, are cast wide at the same time that they focus in on the particularities of black women’s bodies as cultural performers. Those cultural performances and their legacies become not just effects of diaspora but embodiments of its own conceptual power and intellectual messiness. Representing diaspora, for Alexander’s and Richards’s poetry, is a practice of representation that exceeds geographical mention and, indeed, emphasizes its own excessiveness—it is always “guilty of trying to include everything” (Rowell 2004, 1001)—a poetics of accumulation I will return to in the final chapter of the book. Such an intellectual project has been taken up not just through but as form in this chapter, in which a body of text such as the vibrant “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” or the original “C’est l’amour: That’s Love” “reminds us of the complexity of origin, poetic and otherwise; its power lies in its re-invention, its hybridizing of divergent traditions . . . tracing a . . . version of that poetic history” (Frost 2003, 164). If, as Foucault hopes, genealogy is opposed to the search for origins, then the reflective work of Alexander’s and Richards’s formal complexity is to imagine the process of genealogical searching as one which confounds the idea of origin itself, or turns it on its head. As both a style and a process, their work attempts to embody as it questions the parameters (and perimeters) of the body in question.28 And as Katherine Bond Stockton tells us of the “beautiful bottom as imaginative resource,” it “is a well-traveled crossroads” (2006, 10). The

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contingent coupling of familiarity and mobility that Stockton suggests represents Alexander’s and Richards’s ultimate strategy—their practices of negotiating difference within difference, of managing (or failing to manage) the innumerable representations of black women as subjects and objects in the public cultural memory. In “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” and “C’est l’amour: That’s Love,” the cosmopolitan poetics of the black body performs the mobility of representation. Like the branching of genealogical practice, these lyric diasporas are necessarily both structured and unpredictable within particular cultural mappings. Alexander and Richards stage the crisis of black women’s bodies as the metaphorical correspondent to the crisis of historical reproduction, and like jazz as a musical system, these performances depend on a legible frame to produce experimental centers—a reversal of the center-to-margin movement of nostalgically defined diaspora. Their poetics leave us with new ways to reference the specific diasporic order of black women’s representation, from the abjection and subjection of the Venus Hottentot to the spectacular pleasures of the Black Atlantic imagination. The tension between source and resource, exception and example, memory and the archive, is the force which underpins the very emergence of black women in the diaspora as recognizable historical subjects. The following chapter considers how the concept of history in the black diaspora itself shifts when performed by and through black women’s dramatic texts. If history has constructed black women’s bodies, how do those bodies deconstruct, dislocate, and reassemble the historical, particularly the historical memory of gender and sexuality in Africa?

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The Drama of Dislocation: Staging Diaspora History in the Work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo

The reality of the African continent and of its varied peoples is made to conform to a lawlikely prescribed pattern. What is more, it is made to do so both before political independence and after political independence, . . . both during the colonial era and after the colonial era. Can we therefore speak here . . . of merely a colonial rationale as the causal factor which determines the lawlike production of these representations? . . . Not even we ourselves, as African and black diaspora critics . . . can, in the normal course of things, be entirely freed from the functioning of these rules; and therefore, from knowing and representing the “cultural universe of Africa” through the same western “gallery of mirrors” which deforms— even where this deformation is effected in the most radically oppositional terms which seek to challenge rather than to reinforce the deformation. —sylvia wynter, “Africa, the West and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man” (citing V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Invention of Africa)

In 2007, Ama Ata Aidoo’s play The Dilemma of a Ghost was staged in London’s Africa Centre, in association with the National Theatre Company of Ghana, as a commemoration of the fiftieth year since Ghana’s independence, and the two hundredth anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade.1 The drama seems an unlikely choice for inclusion in a national memorial that typically stages historical and political scenes in their most obvious sense; the most direct reference to the slave trade in the play is limited to a few offhand comments about the central African American character’s ancestry and a recurrent song emphasizing former slave-trading posts in Ghana, and it also manages to stay far away from Accra politics. The production, cast with a mix of Ghanaian and Black British actors in a custom-remodeled theatrical space, focuses on the relations of the present rather than the past. As the director of the 2007

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production, Michael Walling, puts it, “The inheritance of the colonial period, of slavery, of economic exploitation, is still with us, and the postcolonial discourse has to be about how the globalized world which is the direct result of that inheritance can be inhabited. Which, of course, is exactly what The Dilemma of a Ghost is about. Certainly what it will be about in 2007 London” (Walling 2006, emphasis mine). This collapsing of the play’s historical time—written and first performed in 1964 during Kwame Nkrumah’s tenure as head of the Ghanaian state and international political celebrity—with the nationalist celebratory time of Ghana, the memorial transatlantic temporality of slavery and abolition, and the modern-day simultaneity of globalization stages the dilemma, too, of this chapter: How do race, gender, and diaspora interact with the concept of “history,” both as it is constructed as a Western narrative of dominance and in counternarratives of resistance? And how does the innovative scripting (and staging) of these categories of analysis as particularly “historical” performances dislocate the temporality of history as one that can claim (or would want to claim) these political scenes as its own?2 Through embodying black women in dislocated orders of ontology and ideology on the stage, Ghanaian author Aidoo and African American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, in her 1964 one-act play Funnyhouse of a Negro, suggest the significant reorganization of binary visions of history through feminist performance. The previous chapter concerned itself with reordering the complex genealogies of black women’s bodies through new strategies of poetic representation; this chapter takes on genealogy itself as an alternative practice for performing historical knowledge—one that uses the shifting sites of gendered corporeality to make its ruptures to existing historical order visible, through and beyond the teleology of corporeal fate. Playwrights Kennedy and Aidoo center on black women’s bodies not as an end or symbolic limit of themselves— though they do not shy away from tragedy—but as an untraced route of geographic and cultural contingency and a potential “site of knowledge production and disruption” that makes colonial histories strange and newly visible (Brooks 2006, 8). If Daphne Brooks diagnoses an “embodied insurgency” in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black theater, Kennedy’s and Aidoo’s work stand as a critical insurgency—upending the internal logics of the assumptions of black community, the racial and political solidarities that plot along the lines of gender, sexual difference, and desire in these dramas. Aidoo’s and Kennedy’s dramas produce subjects incommensurate

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with notions of individual sovereignty or community belonging through the represented and representable limits of the black body. In doing so, they use the disruptive presence of the body to expose and expand on historical discourses of diaspora, and the surprisingly gendered migrations that they perform. For Aidoo, the flexibility of the gendered black body stands in tension with historical continuities between Africa and its diasporic dislocations. For Kennedy, this tension involves spectacularizing black bodies outside of realist representations of space in order to challenge the boundaries of fixed historical markers of diaspora. They map the difficult and the uneven, the eccentric, the unreal, the seemingly nonrepresentative (in the exception/example use of the term) use of the corporeal to trace alternate routes of diaspora history. Drama, then, stands as a medium of critique of ideals of racial community and of the uneven reproduction of historical narratives that refuse black women subjects entry into the ongoing complexity of diaspora narratives of racial belonging. Using the dislocated body, each playwright reverses geographies of expected affinity, with Kennedy writing through discourses of colonialism in Africa and Aidoo through the African American history of slavery. But they do not attempt ordered excavations of narrative history in these unexpected geographies. Rather, like Walter Benjamin (2003), they insist on history as the presence of unexpected pasts erupting, disorderly and disordering their 1964 presents. In this, both plays expose Africa’s problematic place in dominant histories, which subsume it under anachronistic tradition, as well as in diaspora accounts of the present, which also look away from Africa’s hybridity. Aidoo and Kennedy expose how location and histories of race have been appended to one another, particularly in the characterization of Africa as a sign of blackness. The Dilemma of a Ghost, like its 1964 contemporary Funnyhouse of a Negro—a nonrealist one-act play about the psychological deterioration of a young black woman, performed to critical acclaim off-Broadway— views history askance, choosing to interrogate race and geographic community not through direct reference to the past but through the slow drag of the gendered body through unconventional spaces. This absence of various key locations in the standard narrative of black diasporic history—the plantation, the port, the court, and the auction block, as well as the sites of revolutionary struggle—marks a strategic dislocation on the part of Aidoo and Kennedy, one that disinvests in public and pervasive ways of understanding black subjection and the

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historical movements that have informed its dramatic thrust in late twentieth-century public imagination. Instead of staging their plays in the usual locales just listed or with the well-worn relations between history, place, and subject that those locations signify, Aidoo and Kennedy dramatize bodies on the brink of failure in alternative diaspora spaces: an African American woman descending into depression and alcoholism in her husband’s family’s compound in post-Independence rural Ghana, and a suicidal college student in New York City split on the stage into various racialized and historicized “selves.” Rather than create either epic historical scenarios or realist domestic melodramas that metonymically play out to the gendered historical plotting of slavery, decolonization, or neocolonialism, the plays keep their structures ambivalent and even impressionistic in their relationship to the material conditions of black history. In Kennedy’s and Aidoo’s live investigations of the presence of history in the present, their work mirrors feminist critic Sara Ahmed’s provocative statement that “to the extent that historicity poses itself as a question, then it also reveals its own impossibility as an answer” (2000, 9). Here, genre is the key to representing the impossibility of “history” as an explanatory force, something that Caribbean writer Derek Walcott keys in on when he articulates that “the method by which we are taught the past, the progress from motive to event, is the same by which we read narrative fiction” (1998, 37). Kennedy and Aidoo turn to drama as a key venue for siting the difficult terrain of African diaspora histories, mapping the shifting geography of uneven affiliations across race, gender, and location through the unpredictable timing of the stage in ways that question history’s assumed paths through black identity. As actors, costumes, blocking, sets, theaters, and their locales shift through choice and coincidence, so the materials and material consequences of history also move with Aidoo’s and Kennedy’s texts. These contingent readings of history in particular call for the spatialized genre of drama. Performing this genre with different forms across national, cultural, and historical borders, Aidoo and Kennedy employ the recombinant strategies of its immediate contemporaries in modernist theater and the legacy of classical Western traditions on stage, as well as structures of performance that pull from “indigenous” forms, be they slave songs, American cinema, or Ghanaian performance traditions. Kennedy and Aidoo merge bodies and space, literally and materially, always marking their constructed performances of history with the audience through the innovative dramatization of nonlinearity and dissyncretism.

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In doing so, these dramas reconfigure the familiar patterns of migration that characterize African diaspora history—the Middle Passage, the move from the rural colony to the postcolonial urban center, the travel narrative from metropole to cultural homeland—and recast the potential subjects of our critical study in terms of historical location. Aidoo’s and Kennedy’s understandings of the black woman as the subject of and subject to Black Atlantic histories are themselves particular to their historical moment: 1964 marks a time attendant to explosive political and social movements in the African and African American worlds—from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the women’s rights movements in the United States, from articulations of Black nationalism in the nineteensixties to the legacies of Pan-Africanism leading into the Cold War era, to postcolonial national independence movements across the African continent from the nineteen-fifties through the next decade; 1964 is also the year that both Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost were first performed, the former at the East End Theatre off-Broadway in New York City and the latter at the Open Air Theatre at the University of Legon. At the crossroads of major countercultural investments, these plays grapple with how the corporeal might interact in conjunction and in tension with its multiple historical dislocations, as well as its immediate context. These 1964 moments of “danger,” as Benjamin characterizes the crisis points that force “history” into its dialectic formation (2003, 390), are both violent and optimistic: African liberation is sweeping the continent and the Civil Rights movement is about to reach its zenith of mainstream acceptance with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Staring into this optimistic future of race relations, one born of epistemic and physical violence, Aidoo and Kennedy take on, at least partially, what Derek Walcott calls “the truly tough aesthetic of the New World” that “neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force. This shame and awe of history possesses poets of the Third World who think of language as enslavement and who, in a rage for identity, respect only incoherence or nostalgia” (1998, 37). Walcott, writing in 1974 and like Fanon before him, struggles to diagnose the proper aesthetics—for revolution for Fanon and then, for Walcott, postcolonialism. Aidoo and Kennedy, in their theatrical engagements of the question of history, take on Walcott’s charge not via “amnesia” but by attempting the aesthetic investigation of “shame and awe,” “incoherence [and] nostalgia,” themselves. In other words, they make history into the affectual and embodied “absurd” that Walcott calls for, pushing it

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away from narratives of causality and victimhood and making it into an object, not a force, of interrogation (ibid., 41). Their dramas hence move away from history as “enormous catastrophe” and into the time of accumulation around historical crisis and its surprising durations and eruptions in black women’s representations (Benjamin 2003). The staging of Aidoo’s play as a commemoration of the slave trade’s abolition without correlating plot points of resolution (and of Kennedy’s play without a plot), then, suggests a productive unmooring of history from the realm of realism and strict reference. It also recontextualizes the relations of location: presenting slave-trading posts such as Cape Coast and Elmina that connected Africa to the broader Atlantic world via connection to colonial education or exposing the erratic, lingering pastiche of popular history in the uncontextualized referents to African celebrity leaders.3 Rather than abandoning those material presences, the plays engage deeply in the possibilities of represented material variation in the diaspora and how history disciplines, maintains, and is disrupted by their particular resonances. This critical performance happens most saliently in the genre of the dramatic, with its use of live bodies as well as a willing context of performing artificiality on the stage. To borrow Joseph Roach’s terms, Aidoo and Kennedy harness “the vitality and sensuous presence of material forms” in order to intensify and remake our sense of history in the African diaspora (1996, xiii) and, as I argue in my reading of Dilemma, in particular, to queer the relationship between the gendered body, history, and modern constructions of black community. In Adrienne Kennedy’s preface to the 1988 collection of her sixties and seventies one-act plays, she waxes both romantic and incredibly specific about the geographic circumstances surrounding the production of the included works: More than anything I remember the days surrounding the writing of each of these plays . . . the places . . . Accra Ghana and Rome for Funnyhouse of a Negro . . . the shuttered guest house surrounded by gardens of sweet smelling frangipani shrubs . . . in Rome the sunny roof of the apartment on Via Reno . . . Without exception the days when I am writing are days of images fiercely pounding in my head and days of walking . . . in Ghana, across the campus of Legon . . . in Rome through the Forum, in New York along Columbus Avenue and in London, Primrose Hill (hadn’t Karl Marx walked there?) walks and coffee . . . all which seem to put me under a spell of sorts. . . . I am at

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the typewriter almost every waking moment and suddenly there is a play. It would be impossible to say I wrote them. Somehow under this spell they become written. (ix) As a counterpoint to the commemorative production of Aidoo’s play with its domestic locality reworking the colonial frames of reference, Kennedy’s description of being under the “spell” of location is as wide ranging as it is surprising, in that the short plays that follow emphasize a different localization: a graphic, often gruesome physicality representing a set of imagined interior worlds that lack direct resemblance to the locales Kennedy names in the preface. Kennedy’s traveling sense of what it means to produce in, and to be produced by, the particulars of geography introduces the strange tension between—and possibilities of—representing the ideological weight of diaspora history in her 1964 one-act Funnyhouse of a Negro. These conflicting interests and identities are performatively embodied in the central figure of Sarah, a contemporary black woman and student in New York City, and the experimental drama’s population of her multiple, fragmented “selves,” including English and European royalty (Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg), Christian idols (Jesus), and postcolonial African activists/politicians (Patrice Lumumba). In these split but interrelated bodies, Kennedy innovatively dramatizes the devastating confluence of African diaspora histories of colonial trauma with ideological claims on black women’s identity. Black women’s bodies, so often placed in discourses of example (the metonymic representative of the whole) and exception (the break from the familiar that reconfirms the normative), as discussed in the previous chapter, can do perhaps more than perform the psychic weight of collective racial trauma. Instead, they can constitute a location, privileging not “the subject” or its deconstruction but the relationality of history as discourse, as imaginary, as substance. Like the body, history becomes a contingency—expansive in its possibility for movement but also stifling in its insistent refusal to block out claustrophobic colonialisms. The body as a thing in the play bears the marks of the horror of chattel slavery, which, as Saidiya Hartman argues in Scenes of Subjection (1997), is also the mark of humanness and its limits.4 Kennedy’s 1964 play does not perform the black female body as the reference that signals back out to a recognizable narrative “history” but instead imagines black women’s bodies as one among an impossible variety of material and ideological sites of the cultural accumulation.

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Funnyhouse, then, does not easily map onto the terrain of either the Black Arts or the Civil Rights movement, as it already starts to see through the aesthetic and political limitations of both’s claim to rights, especially for black women.5 The explicit cartography of Kennedy’s own wide-ranging preface directs this accumulation through the filter of historical location, starting with the author’s note: funnyhouse of a negro is perhaps clearest and most explicit when the play is placed in the girl Sarah’s room. The center of the stage works well as her room, allowing the rest of the stage as the place for herselves. Her room should have a bed, a writing table and a mirror. Near her bed is the statue of Queen Victoria; other objects might be her photographs and her books. When she is placed in her room with her belongings, then the director is free to let the rest of the play happen around her. (1988, 1) Reading the play as an exercise in spatial relations—between Sarah’s rooms as much as between the embodied, performed “selves”—interiority becomes another component of represented space, here grounded by the meticulous repetition of other objects in staged space. Funnyhouse’s plot hinges on the fate of Sarah’s body as a representative site of the hybrid history of colonial and racial trauma. But Funnyhouse’s rooms themselves are distorted but material worlds, filled with the props of what Elin Diamond acutely imagines as the domain of Kennedy’s work—the popular culture mythologies which travel through histories and shift our notions of race, gender, and sexuality in each appearance and utterance (1997, 108). If Kennedy’s play seemed out of step with the Black Power politics of its time (Carpenter 2009, 16), it has reverberated as a dramatization of the various historical and cultural locations which have “fought” over control of black women’s bodies and their representation. The play, and my reading of it, is not as much about the fate of bodies, or the plot, as it is about the convergence of various cultural threads on a given historically contingent site. On a basic level, we can look at the direct references to diaspora locations—including Harlem, Africa, and Victorian England—to think about the geography Kennedy reimagines for the historical discourse of race. In a scene between Raymond/The Funnyman (white Jewish boyfriend/entertainer of the “funnyhouse”) and the “Duchess of Hapsburg” (one of Sarah’s selves and German royalty who lived in Mexico, a reference Kennedy got from watching the Bette Davis movie Juarez), the setting is Raymond’s room, with a bed

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and blinds that open to reveal mirrors, as well as “their attitudes of physical intimacy”: duchess. My father is arriving and what am I to do? (raymond walks about the place opening the blinds and laughing.) funnyman. He is arriving from Africa, is he not? duchess. Yes, yes, he is arriving from Africa. funnyman. I always knew your father was African. duchess. He is an African who lives in the jungle. He is an African who has always lived in the jungle. Yes, he is a nigger who is an African who is a missionary teacher and is now dedicating his life to the erection of a Christian mission in the middle of the jungle. He is a black man. funnyman. He is a black man who shot himself when they murdered Patrice Lumumba. duchess. (Goes on wildly.) Yes, my father is a black man who went to Africa years ago as a missionary teacher, got mixed up in politics, was reviled and is now devoting his foolish life to the erection of a Christian mission in the middle of the jungle in one of those newly freed countries. Hide me (Clinging to his knees.) Hide me here so the nigger will not find me. funnyman. (Laughing.) Your father is in the jungle dedicating his life to the erection of a Christian mission. duchess. Hide me here so the jungle will not find me. Hide me. funnyman. Isn’t it cruel of you? duchess. Hide me from the jungle. funnyman. Isn’t it cruel? duchess. No, no. funnyman. Isn’t it cruel of you? duchess. No. (1988, 9–10) The origin (“Africa”) is linked to what Sylvia Wynter refers to as the “ontological rationale” of Western discourse (“He is”), location and body constantly connected through the rhetorics of both white and black genealogy, obsessively repeated (2001, 43–44). Empire—as the cultural and ideological as well as the political and geographic spread of colonialism—yokes the body to particular locales of meaning, making historical destiny the ground for claims to certain subjectivities and geographic subjections. Africa is like Sarah’s selves, made up of rooms on the Upper West Side, Victorian Britain, missionary impulses on the part of African

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Americans and other empire seekers, ontologies and epistemologies so convoluted as to never exist in an originary form. The diaspora for Funnyhouse is a series of reflected histories, with the performed struggle between staged bodies enacting the keen desire to cling to static, familiar ideologies of racial-geographic belonging. Africa teases out to “black” even as the logic of sequence denies authenticity to the duchess’s claims. The psychoanalytic refrain “Isn’t it cruel of you?” (and the body’s scream of “No”) mimics and then refuses the disciplinary wish to separate the “positive” narrative of black community across diasporas from the questionable genealogies of difficult or impossibly complex diaspora relations. The particularity of Africa here is, ironically, its characterization as unknown—the “dark continent” on which Kennedy writes the scripts of both romance and anger that are figured in the sequencing and the lapse of linguistic logic in the quoted passage. But it is in Africa that Kennedy finds the aesthetic properties of unrealism that launch her move toward and inside these very American scripts that insist on realism and race’s tandem interests. She writes in her brilliant and equally as impressionistic autobiography, The People Who Led to My Plays, Africans or the masks: A few years before, Picasso’s work had inspired me to exaggerate the physical appearances of my characters, but not until I bought a great African mask from a vendor on the streets of Accra, of a woman with a bird flying through her forehead, did I totally break from realistic-looking characters. I would soon create a character with a shattered, bludgeoned head. And that was his fixed surreal appearance. (1996, 121) As her papers indicate, in early drafts of the short story that led to Funnyhouse, Kennedy begins with a sort of realist, near autobiographical (regarding her parents and the cracks in her own marriage) attempt to render the locale of Africa.6 But while in Ghana with her husband, she instead finds in African aesthetic practices the freedom to move away from the realistically rendered black body. At the same time and unlike (white) modernists before her, she insists on continuing to investigate race, gender, and sexuality as fundamentally meaningful categories cast through this fantastic frame—like her Harlem Renaissance peers Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer, and others, before her but with an acknowledgment of colonialism, not just a romantic history of race. Digging deep into the critical category of primitivism, she constructs her setting as anticolonialist critique, showcasing deteriorating and degenerating

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bodies in the face of overwhelming historical scripts of representation. Freed from the burden of representing a positive or realist Africa, she instead employs its exploited aesthetic forms to critique the imaginative valance that is wedded to the continent’s historical representation as the photographic negative to the colonial metropole. That unrealistic bodies and references are Kennedy’s tools is matched by her insistence on these occurrences in Western popular culture as well as in African art. Kennedy’s voracious and voraciously documented consumption of American and British cinematic and literary form shows up as the inescapable hybrid of fantastic subjects of transformation. She documents both her own and pop culture’s fascination with unreal corporealities in People Who Led to My Plays, speaking of monster figure Wolfman as “changing personae at an alarming rate” (1996, 16) and of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as violating time in the dramatic idea of “living though epochs of your life within an hour of an evening” (31). Collapsing bodies in time and in space not only serves as the blueprint for Funnyhouse’s main “plot” but also unlocks unlikely affiliations between generic forms in the West and African forms of representation. Yoking horror and the grotesque with insidious racism, Kennedy plays with the Kurtzian “horror” of colonial discovery, turning it on its head as a critique of the fantastic violence (particularly psychological violence) of the postcolonial “condition” of racialized and sexualized subjectivity. That Kennedy’s play is not a romantic or realist rendering of the cosmopolitan mobilities on display in the author’s note is not to say that it does not engage in aesthetic modes of the spectacular and the quotidian. In setting, in costume, and in the staging of bodies, it is both fantastic and hyperreal—a materialization of metaphoric violence wrought on the body. This identification of Kennedy’s nonrealist aesthetics is also traced/defended by Billie Allen, the actress who originated the role of Sarah, in her African American Review interview on her 2007 direction of the play (Kolin 2007b), and in Joni Jones’s (2005) work on Kennedy’s break from more recognizable formations of “blackness.”7 Surrealist whiteface and near gothic costumes were used for Sarah’s selves in the original production, while Sarah herself maintained a realistic costume.8 As a reverse play on minstrelsy tradition, the whiteface signals the acute, tragic parody the play makes of histories of colonial domination and their enduring, collective psychological trauma.9 The “funnyhouse,” or insane asylum, of identity politics is turned into a “funhouse,” a carnival scene of whiteness that exposes not just the fragile psyche of black

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women’s subjectivity but the deep construction of whiteness as the symbolic other to the “dark continent” of black abjection. Funnyhouse argues that to engage in mythic racial narratives with an expectation of performing a completeness of progressive racial identification is to fail. To claim the space of failure, then, and to meticulously map how the body is failing in various interactions, is to lay claim to Kennedy’s aesthetics of diaspora history. Stage directions are more than a hint in Kennedy’s drama—detailed stage and set directions frame each major scene or speech, often, as critic Erin Hurley (2004) points out, articulating “impossible” substantiation, such as, “The negro stands by the wall and throughout the following speech, the following characters come through the wall” (Kennedy 1988, 6–7). The critical emphasis placed on the body as the material of the subject becomes dislocated in the face of the overwhelming histories of diaspora and its circulating cultural objects. This “failure” renders not as tragedy but as the generative territory of disarticulating the desire for representative subjectivity that continues to haunt and to halt interdisciplinary study of race and gender. Kennedy engages this genealogy of the black body, but not as mirror. Her staged bodies, like her impossible and impossibly cosmopolitan geographies, defy the limits of the material—they multiply, defy death, and regenerate at rapid, nonlinear paces. Not denying the legacy of pain and suffering, Kennedy instead expands and includes in that paradigm the physical but also the psychic weight of colonial expansion, through slavery and beyond, as exceeding the borders of the individual body or the easily recognizable collective one. Black women’s bodies then become the center of diaspora history, not through a static notion of pain or objectification but as the dynamic performers of different geographic and ideological imperatives and desires. But rather than an analytic of loss and death, which preoccupies the play in terms of repetition but not teleology, we might do best to think of Funnyhouse’s aesthetic strategy as one of innovative transformation—that which confronts the overwhelming weight of colonial history closely but does not turn that confrontation into a uniting loss. Indeed, if anything, it seems resolutely antiunity in its nonsyncretic use of time, space, bodies, and politics. Funnyhouse performs a cartography of both the pleasure and pain of object relations in various historical and geographic terrains, looking back to Fred Moten and Jackie Kay in the first chapter. More devastatingly antisubject than even Suzan Lori-Parks’s excessive inhabitation of Saartjie Baartman in Venus, Kennedy refuses the lure of interiority as a way to resolve racialized corporeality and,

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hence, politics.10 Funnyhouse’s characters violate time and space, even under dramatic conventions, multiplying, shifting races and genders, morphing from object to speaking subject and back again, performing the interior as a surface itself, occupied by a series of incongruous references, objects, histories, confluences. In a monologue that exhibits a similarly willful impossibility of both rational progression and sequential logic, Sarah (Negro) maps out a failing narrative of identity for the audience: The rooms are my rooms; a Hapsburg chamber, a chamber in a Victorian castle, the hotel where I killed my father, the jungle. These are the places myselves exist in. I know no places. That is, I cannot believe in places. To believe in places is to know hope and to know the emotion of hope is to know beauty. It links us across a horizon and connects us to the world. I find there are no places only my funnyhouse. Streets are rooms, cities are rooms, eternal rooms. I try to create a place for myselves in cities, New York, the Midwest, a southern town, but it becomes a lie. I try to give myselves a logical relationship but that too is a lie. For relationships was one of my last religions. I clung loyally to the lie of relationships, again and again seeking to establish a connection between my characters. Jesus is Victoria’s son. Mother loved my father before her hair fell out. A loving relationship exists between myself and Queen Victoria, a love between myself and Jesus, but they are lies. (1988, 7) Mirroring the romantic opening passage on Kennedy’s writing location, this monologue undoes myths of racial, national, religious, historical, and affective connection and affinity. The lie of home, of an implied community of subjects, is the lie of equivalent relationality between subjects and place—that somehow one can (re)narrate contact accurately or rationally. Giving up equivalence or mastery of knowledge—“I know no places”—can be read as a refusal to discipline the subject in and through predetermined frameworks of relationality: race, gender, and sexuality, as well as capital, religion, history, and empire. The cosmology of various (in)famous systems comes into play here— be it movie stars, royalty, revolutionaries—the stars coalescing only in temporary connection with one another in an imagined Harlem hotel, not in any stable sense of Harlem as black community par excellence, much like Kay’s displacement. The ritual and romance of various disciplinary terrains, like these star systems—be they the “romance of white history,” as one critic diagnoses Kennedy’s fixation (Blau 1984, 521), or

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that of the myth of Africa as homeland—is undone or, rather, exposed, as are our own critical structures for speaking the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality in the romantic imagining of interdisciplinarity. The impossibilities of relationality are laid bare in the final hanging body of Sarah (Negro), deconstructed while still present on the stage, our discourse desperately trying to cling to the structures of knowable, traceable, material bodies and their fates as the limits of black history: BLACKOUT Another WALL drops. There is a white plaster statue of Queen Victoria which represents the Negro’s room in the brownstone, the room appears near the staircase highly lit and small. The main prop is the statue but a bed could be suggested. The figure of Victoria is a sitting figure, one of astonishing repulsive whiteness, suggested by dusty volumes of books and old yellowed walls. The Negro Sarah is standing perfectly still, we hear the KNOCKING, the LIGHTS come on quickly, her Father’s black figure with bludgeoned hands rushes upon her, the LIGHT GOES BLACK and we see her hanging in the room. LIGHTS come on the laughing Landlady. And at the same time remain on the hanging figure of the Negro. Landlady. The poor bitch has hung herself. (Funnyman Raymond appears from his room at the commotion.) The poor bitch has hung herself. Raymond. (Observing her hanging figure.) She was a funny little liar. (1988, 22–23) If we look on the hanging body, which remains, without the last word or a clear and distinct trajectory of meaning, as less of a representation of a semirealistic narrative arc and more of one in a series of repeating objects in Kennedy’s innovative set (re)design of colonialism, we might renegotiate the constant presence of strange, fantastic, iconoclastic bodies in transnational figurations of black women. Just as the final lines of the play deny Sarah’s narrative of her genealogy/traumatic history, delinking the Father to Lumumba, so too does the staging of the play insist on the constant domestication of the fantastic legacies of colonialism and the specter of “Africa” as the equally fantastic origin of blackness. Africa, like the spectacular hanging black woman’s body, is the signifier that brings together unbelievable, intersecting strains of history. Kennedy insists on something more than just the tragic narrative and embodiment in letting

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both geography and black women’s bodies represent themselves excessively, through and beyond the limits of their teleologies of destruction. If destruction of these bodies—literal and bodies of land—has already occurred, she seems to argue with her stage directions, then what happens after that moment of destruction needs to be viewed, squarely, without flinching, as an integral part of our history and our present. History, bodies, and geographies keep going, keep getting reproduced culturally and physically. And culture does not equal mere confirmation of the past. Kennedy herself recharacterizes these historical relations in People Who Led to My Plays. She repeatedly calls to the presence of statues (alongside film stars) as meaningful encounters along with the epiphanies of form offered by African masks and Dickens’s novels. On page 118, she tells another origin tale of Funnyhouse as being inspired by imaginary conversations among various historical statues of her youth—as a way of engaging the idea of history alongside its iconographic and disparately, unevenly connected construction. Again eschewing unity, she continues on to her travels in Africa, where she encounters embodied history that seemed to literalize and hence violate the temporality of national and Pan-African belonging. First, there is the vision of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s “shattered head” after the news of his assassination in Africa in 1961 (1996, 119). Then, as she notes of Nkrumah’s statue, “to see a man and to see a statue of him in the same space of time broke through boundaries in my mind” (122), Kennedy introduces us to a particularly diasporic aesthetic of time—one that marks national history in the present with similar markers to those colonial narratives defined by the long passage of time which bestows them with legitimacy, à la Queen Victoria’s statue. Placing Lumumba alongside Queen Victoria, Jesus, and the Duchess of Hapsburg as aspects of a contemporary black self is to dramatize, aesthetically, this reperformed diaspora time—uneven, disparate, hybrid, unpredictable, like the bodies that characterize diaspora experience: decidedly not unified, or even particularly affiliated, except by the affective will of the subject and its multiply constituted communities. Both cosmopolitan and destructive, the modern diaspora staged in Kennedy’s play leads to performances of dislocation, or radical failures of assimilation, affiliation, and affinity with multiple political agendas—and, significantly, notions of the subject—including the lingering spectacle of black bodies through and after death. Disarticulated from the imagined scenarios of history in the play, black women subjects come to stage the local and the global as incommensurate not just with each other but with notions of subject-centered autonomy, including corporeal rights performed differently

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across racial, national, and gendered borders. The historical-cultural site includes the material body but is not trumped by its symbolic limits. Bodies do not haunt as much as they only partially occupy Kennedy’s vision of diaspora—lingering, materially, on the scene of criticism as one in a series of “things” that accumulate to an identity, or an “identity crisis,” in this case (Kolin 2007b, 170). The body is the site that continues to give meaning to relationality, describing the particularities of the subject’s impossibility in the repetitive performance of discursively violent and violated material. The impossibility of resolving these tensions represents and mobilizes itself in the negotiated spaces of Funnyhouse, refusing to fetishize (African) American, diaspora, or transnational feminist narratives of solidarity or community, or the recognizable delineation of the individual subject as a part of a cohesive social unit, even as it gives into the omnipresence of racial and gendered objectification, Western (Bette Davis) or African (the “Ethiopian princesses” of Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays [1996, 119]). Rather than migrating subjects, Funnyhouse imagines dislocating the “stars” of the interdisciplines, these studied celebrity bodies of intersectional identity, to focus on the discipline itself—the academic, social, political, and physical locations where we produce these projections of “analyzed” subjects of inquiry, deflecting the gaze from the overdetermined and sometimes arbitrary geographies that (per)formed them.11 Kennedy’s suicidal subject is less about the tragedy of unrepresentability than migrating our critical attentions from the tragic romance that bounds the fate of the body to the “rooms” that house those narratives of corporeal intent and sentience. If there is a romance to representing the cultural force of location in Funnyhouse, it is not one of recovered bodies but of making room for the other objects that define diasporic experience. The death of the subject, so literally represented in Funnyhouse’s plot, does not destroy the set, the structure. Rather, the experience of radical dislocation, of character but, most importantly, of the audience in watching the disparate parts come together and fail to unify is, to put it in Kennedy’s terms, literally alienating. She refers to watching Bette Davis in Juarez perform the Duchess of Hapsburg in Mexico adrift and rendered “alien,” a different species in a different time, by the strange experience of exile. Rather than lamenting that loss in the same way, critically, every time it is represented, Funnyhouse suggests we look to the accumulation of cultural referents, of objects and the narratives we place them in, for new discursive and subjective connections to history each time. Like the complex and surprising routes Kennedy attributes to the production of the play, Kennedy’s aesthetics suggest that how we narrate and represent history

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comes out of and reveals the strange confluence of locations that make up our practices of critical interpretations. In foregrounding the body’s performative disintegration, Kennedy dislocates the primacy of geographic and national connections and affiliations in reading the African diaspora. If the bodies and locations do not add up but instead accumulate and dissociate in Kennedy’s staged world, then an inquiry into that alienation is all that we are left with as a collective project of history making, one that centers the difficult and divergent paths of black women across the diaspora. As Kennedy dislocates Africa as but one of many mythic origin stories about race in the United States, Ama Ata Aidoo stages African American identity at the periphery of continental postcolonialism. If Kennedy’s Funnyhouse creates alienated, dislocated bodies in a claustrophobic transhistorical structure, then Ama Ata Aidoo stages, for her audience, a more definite location—the whole play is on one set, a guest compound and the adjoining road in rural Ghana—with an “alien” protagonist, Eulalie, an African American woman in the nineteen-sixties married to a native Ghanaian with whom she has just immigrated to Accra. Eulalie’s’ character is not just an immigrant to the nation but herself an “alien” to the social structures and landscape imposed on her by the play. And if the play’s five acts and near-choruslike classical structure denotes a familiar paradigm, its refusal to move forward or resolve the tension surrounding Eulalie’s alien presence and body—on a series of visits to this rural setting—suggests a similarly ambivalent relationship to the history of constructed coalitions of race in the diaspora. Far from an easy racial “home,” Eulalie’s Ghana is “a place of disorientation and social conformity” (Davies 1994, 45). Aidoo’s play suggests that we bring such skepticism to notions of diaspora history that emphasize transnational community, especially as gender and sexuality dislocate those attempts at affiliation. Critic Thérèse Migraine-George, writing about Aidoo’s later play Anowa, argues that Aidoo “highlights the ways African women have to deal with global practices and ideologies that, in their dislocated world, allow them to achieve only unstable and fragile forms of self-representation” (2007, 96). As a “commemoration” of the end of the slave trade, the play’s drama of Eulalie’s dislocated body represents an indirect return of the repressed—not England’s reckoning with the guilt of the human rights violations of chattel slavery but West Africa’s own complex relationship to colonialism and its diasporic reverberations, as well as the “privileges” of modernity that African America and urban Ghana

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maintain. Why and how, Dilemma asks, should postcolonial Africa care about and for the history of slavery? What place does the slave body—as representative of the trauma of Gilroy’s modernity—have in contemporary diaspora politics? And how does that body intersect with the gendered labor that seems to endure for women in 1964 diaspora structure? In 1964, it has been seven years since Independence, and the complexities of Kwame Nkrumah’s presidency, as opposed to his revolutionary political organizing for decolonization, are beginning to surface. Solidarity around nationalism, or around political leaders of Africa, is no longer an end in itself for Aidoo’s generation. Dilemma looks both inward, critiquing Aidoo’s own state, and outward, thinking through the implications of colonialism and Pan-African connection. As I suggested at the start of this chapter, the inquiries sprouting from the imposed transnational commemoration, like the play itself, are ambivalent, innovative, and queer in their range of understanding what constitutes a racial community. Queer here is not about same-sex desire but more closely aligned with a disruption in expected performances of gender and embodiment, and a sexuality played out, like Kay’s, through an erotics of objects. For Dilemma, those objects are mind and body altering: birth control, alcohol, cigarettes, washing machines, slave songs, and ghosts. The social and communal reorganizations they entail disrupt clear narratives of progress, Independence, and racial solidarity. Rather than building an environment around a body, Aidoo’s play instead takes Wole Soyinka’s principle that first and foremost, drama constitutes an integration between human actors and the built/existing environment (1976, 40). Location, then, is what is constituted with the body in both “local” and “global” historical discourse. At the end of act 1, at the revelation that Ato, a Ghanaian student recently returned from the United States, has married an African American women, Eulalie, Aidoo narrates the complex logic of how bound bodies are to historical location, and the disorienting stakes of racial and gender dislocation: petu: ato: esi:

Ato, where does your wife come from? [A short silence. All look at Ato.] But no one is prepared to listen to me. My wife comes from . . . America. [Putting her hand on her head] Oh Esi! You have an unkind soul. We always hear of other women’s sons going to the white man’s country. Why should my own go and marry a white woman?

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monka: akyere:

ato:

akroma: ato:

nana: ato: all: ato:

nana:

ato: nana:

Amrika! My brother, you have arrived indeed. [sic] But we thought that we too have found a treasure at last for our house. What have you done to us, my son? We do not know the ways of the white people. Will not people laugh at us? [Very nervously] But who says I have married a white woman? Is everyone in America white? In that country there are white men and black men. Nephew, you must tell us properly. We do not know. But you will not listen to me. [All quiet. Eyes are focused on Ato.] I say my wife is as black as we all are. [Sighs of relaxation] Is that what people call their children in the white man’s country? [Irritably.] It is not the white man’s country. O . . . O . . . Oh! Please, I beg you all, listen. Eulalie’s ancestors were of our ancestors. But [warming up] as you all know, the white people came and took some away in ships to be slaves . . . [Calmly] And so, grand-child, all you want to tell us is that your wife is a slave? [At this point even the men get up in shock from their seats. All the women break into violent weeping. Esi Kom is beside herself with grief. She walks around in all attitudes of mourning.] [Wildly] But she is not a slave. It was her grandfather and her grandmothers who were slaves. Ato, do not talk with the foolishness of your generation. (1995, 16–18)

This is hardly a celebratory scene of “healing,” a reckoning with England’s colonial practices, a celebration of the independent state, or a historical representation of slavery or the Middle Passage, and the choice to stage The Dilemma of a Ghost for this commemorative event, like the play itself, is not an obvious line from one historical point. The few critical readings of the play hone in on the partial scene just quoted, arguing that the play is a rare reckoning with Africa’s own strained memory of its role in the slave trade and the reverberations of that history. Modupe Olaogun argues that the play stages slavery “as not a discrete historical event, but an event with prehistories and consequences” (2002, 190). Thérèse Migraine-George more broadly states that “these characters who all to a certain extent experience

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the consequences of Westernization, suffer from a state of melancholy fostered by their unsuccessful attempt to ‘return’ to a place and time that should allow them both to ‘belong’ and to start their lives anew” (2003, 84), a familiar path leading back to the contradictory desires of diaspora.12 While the question of slavery can certainly be read as one of the “dilemmas” of the play’s title, Aidoo’s scene also takes seriously the comedy of Ato’s explanations to the increasingly panicked misinterpretations of his wife’s race and origin. This moment comes midway through a group interrogation about Eulalie’s name (which no one can pronounce) and her tribal status until, finally, we get to the point of revelation: historical geography. Uncle Petu ask for Eulalie’s origin, and when Ato replies “America,” its transnational racial currency is assumed to equal “whiteness.” Ato’s response is to challenge first his family’s geographic knowledge of the diaspora and then to “educate” his family on the history of Eulalie’s black identity: the slave trade. To be from America is to be white; to be from Africa, in the context of this scene, is to be black. But to be a descendant of slaves is to be a part of “foolishness,” in proximity to death (“the attitudes of mourning”), and, as Aidoo’s makeshift chorus of two women from the village tells us at the start of act 2, to be a “black-white woman / a stranger and a slave—” (1995, 22). These poles of diaspora history center dislocation—the queered, “alien” construction of modernity through the cultural economy of race and racial formation in the diaspora. In this intraracial precursor to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,13 the common rules of diaspora connection are laid out—location is yoked to the racialized body, so that Africa is equivalent to blackness as a matter of course, as in Kennedy’s Duchess sequence. But the enslaved body does not enjoy such unambiguous status in this version of racial community. It is, instead, a “stranger” to the quotidian discourse of (post) colonial experience in the play—in fact, it is only brought up in passing a few more times. While critics rightly point to this as an intervention in African public memory of the slave trade, this dislocation of the bodies of slavery to the margins of blackness can strategically dislocate African American studies’ focus on the middle passage as the defining moment of diaspora history. As Yogita Goyal notes, Aidoo’s focus on Africa performs “how the concept of the Black Atlantic changes when colonization becomes as central as slavery” (2010b, 245). Aidoo’s play imagines slavery not as the ineffable but as one of a roster of both overwhelming and subtle articulations of colonialism that link ontology and geography, much as Kennedy imagines the psychic traps of white historiography. Colonized or captive seem to be the “choices” for diaspora narratives of

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history, ones the play upends by staging the ghosts of Black Africa’s participation in colonial endeavors such as the slave trade but also a much longer system of cause and effects that include America’s trajectory as modern superpower and the possibilities of travel and colonial systems of education that are unevenly available to the continent. The dilemma of this drama is then not as clear as its commemorative status may suggest. The play starts in America, with a scene between the newly married couple, who are negotiating their reproductive agenda, or lack thereof, upon heading to live in Africa. This is actually the plot catalyst of the play, the dilemma of Ato and Eulalie’s fertility, a dilemma that centers the action around Eulalie’s increasingly stagnant and silent body in the rest of the text. What critic Angeletta Gourdine refers to as the necessary “fiction of place” in diaspora literature then reads back onto black women’s bodies, attempting to discipline corporeality into familiar, coherent rubrics of the social and cultural meaning of choice and agency (2003, 18). As both stranger and slave, and like Kennedy’s hanging Sarah and dead/not dead father, Eulalie’s presence disrupts not just the fictitious family’s notions of racial belonging (and Eulalie’s own) but also our own critical readings of diaspora as an analytical frame for discussing racial and gendered difference and its historical reproductions. As Florence Stratton speaks of Aidoo’s constant themes, they include “marriage, motherhood, emotional and economic dependence, women’s education, their political and economic marginalization, their resistance to oppression” (1994, 175).14 These preoccupations recenter gender as a central concern when looking at how colonialism and the modern diaspora operate, rerouting our central inquires not to the margins but through the margins. For Aidoo, this also includes the evocation of Africa itself as a site of diaspora organizing, where “the image of the African woman in the mind of the world has been set” (1998, 39) in unfortunate modes of either suffering or invisibility (a critique she has repeated in numerous essays and interviews). In Dilemma, she imagines an African present that is informed by histories of gender and sexuality. Alienated from slavery-as-history, Aidoo’s play offers a methodology of the Black Atlantic that imagines Africa not only as origin or referent but also as one of its material and ideological locations, displacing the Middle Passage and the slave body as the privileged referents of diaspora. Such a shift requires that we also move the boundaries of black history through black women’s bodies. This refocuses diaspora studies on multiple colonial and postcolonial formations of blackness. This redefinition of diaspora’s construction calls particular attention to

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the way discourses of corporeality are linked to ontologies of location. Aidoo’s play seeks to expose and unmake these discursive links, denying the romanticization of either space or the body as domains in need of recovery or reconciliation in any easy sense of those terms. With a flexible notion of the body, the historical subject and the community it engenders are critiqued as untenable, in terms of attachment to those boundaries—again foregrounding the contingent politics of location. Aidoo stages the dilemma of the raced body by scrupulously undermining familiar disciplining narratives that claim historical significance. The reproduction of the abjection of the enslaved body displayed in the scene presented earlier plays out with the complex difference of not abjecting blackness, as such. Any easy notions of essentialized connection through the body, through ontologies of race in particular but also through motherhood, are defamiliarized, including a blackness linked through the experience and history of slavery at its core. Eulalie’s body is “a stranger and a slave” in its historical dislocation to postcolonial Ghana, a hybrid of the affective economies of trauma that characterize African American studies’ construction of enslaved subjects and the discourses of Western modernity that “contaminate” the diaspora subject. As a variation on the oral tradition of a dilemma tale,15 this “strangeness” is particularly coded into the gendered performances of the body in the play (Okpewho 1983, 182): [eulalie goes into their room.] ato: But Eulalie . . . monka: [Derisively] That’s the golden name . . . esi: Yes, Hureri, Hurerei . . . What does my lady say today? . . . [eulalie comes back, sits on the terrace and starts puffing her cigarette.] monka: She reminds me of the words in the song: “She is strange, She is unusual. She would have done murder Had she been a man. But to prevent Such an outrage They made her a woman!” Look at a female! [eulalie ignores Monka although her face shows she guesses at what is going on.] (Aidoo 1995, 33)

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Throughout the play, cigarettes and alcohol become more frequent props for Eulalie, and for the drama to underscore the substantial effects and the constructed strategies of critical isolationism and the necessary failure of coalitions based on assumed similarity. The dilemma tale, which “poses difficult questions of moral or legal significance, . . . debated both by the narrator and the audience” (L. Brown 1981, 85), is a debate on and over Eulalie’s increasingly codependent, silent body. As Goyal argues about the play, “Aidoo focuses on the awkwardness of cultural contact rather than promising enlightenment or reciprocity” (2010b, 247). Eulalie moves in and out of the scene, managed and read into subjectivity without the possibility of translation—left “unaffiliated,” as Goyal notes, a cyborg of calcified notions of history, modernity, and identity politics (2010b, 251). Her corporeal refusals of reproduction (via contraception) and performances of masculine agency and individualism in toxic indulgence place her body into a liminal space of comprehension, just as her name, race, and nationality or even her desire for kitchen appliances in Accra do; at one point, the chorus women wonder if she is “pregnant with a machine-child” (Aidoo 1995, 39). These hybrid desires, crowded in Eulalie’s dislocated body, do not register across diasporic boundaries as culturally legible. The management of technologies of the body and sexuality (including labor, leisure, and reproduction) gives way to the difficult negotiation of diaspora space and discourse around historical and geographic connection. Connection as a whole is not reproducible, organically or technologically. The dilemma becomes not how to reconcile history as much as how to incorporate the partial, uneven modes of contact and cooperation between different bodies and geographies into our practices of reading diaspora. Eulalie’s body, like Kennedy’s Sarah, is not a dilemma preformed but one constructed by context and one construed differently by the African lens than that of African American studies. A cipher, Eulalie’s ineffability is a “dilemma” to drive the conflict of the plot, but the play’s refusal to resolve either her silence or her unruly body suggests a critical potential in the “stranger.” Queering “the stranger and the slave,” The Dilemma of a Ghost suggests that Eulalie’s body if not disrupts, then generatively dislodges normative historical narratives of race and colonialism, exposing the (hetero)sexualization and deep gendering of locationbased analyses of race and difference.16 The two women of the chorus (whom Gay Wilentz refers to as the “ethical advisors” of the play [1992, 49]) open each act with a discussion of the variances of marriage and motherhood. As presented through Eulalie’s “dilemma,” their presence

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is at once a critique of the limits of social discourses on women and the ways that even intracultural differences (one woman has eleven children and the other is “barren”) find articulation through the “strange” case of Eulalie’s foreign body, just as colonial discourse invented black difference (L. Brown 1981, Olaussen 2002, Berrian 1987). Charging us to “look at a female” as the strange diasporic center of black history, The Dilemma of a Ghost asks us, for a moment, to imagine a connection between the stranger and the slave, the privileged and the pained body, and the discourses that claim those bodies as such.The staging itself in the 2007 production reinforces this, with the singular setting of the courtyard including both the main drama and side shows of musicians, the village women who serve as the chorus, and others passing through the scenes. As both the “wayfarer” and the colonized body, Eulalie embodies a cosmopolitanism that remains responsible not just to the histories of colonialism (including slavery) but to the continuing presence of those histories in the contemporary moment, and the disparities between those experiences in geographies of meaning that foreground difference. Her alcohol-imbibing, nonreproductive body is literally the focus of concern, as even in the small community represented by the play, she comes to represent anxiety over the pathologies and traumas of both local and global locations of race and gender—African women as fertile mothers, enslavement as a mark of inferiority, African enslavement as a mark of weak or perverse morality. In this, Aidoo problematizes the ideals of feminist “choice” through the varied histories of black women’s bodies in the diaspora. Much like Brechtian theories of alienation, in which a political dilemma is laid bare and made strange at the same time, The Dilemma of a Ghost asks us to pivot African American studies’ vision of race, Africa, and diaspora toward the present, however bleak or dislocated it may present itself to be. Not merely a critique of American or African provincialism (though it is certainly both), Aidoo’s play betrays its historical intervention in its very structure. While plotting itself around the trajectory of Eulalie’s body, the prelude, middle, and end of the play anchor themselves in performances of the fictions of postcolonial agency, as both Ato and the audience are called out for their desires for resolution and reconciliation even while the power dynamics of such desires are critically laid bare as a “failure of alliances” (Innes 1991, 135). The prelude starts an encounter with a ghost/dream, and the firm declaration of “I am the Bird of the Wayside,” who can take the shape of any number of discursive contexts: animal (“the sudden scampering in the

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undergrowth”), human (“a pair of women, your neighbours / chattering their lives away”), or even a temporary vision (“the trunkless head of the shadow in the corner”) (Aidoo 1995, 7). Calling out our desire for narrativity, the prelude continues, I can furnish you with reasons why this and that and other thing Happened. But stranger, What would you have me say About the Odumna clan? . . . Look around you, For the mouth must not tell everything (7) Instead of indulging in causality, the author surrogate asks us to read this performance beyond textuality, and with a critique of the reproductive futurity of diaspora histories in mind (L. Edelman 2004). The play rehearses a realism with large time gaps between acts but with a heightened form of distance through the use of the chorus and the narrator/ Bird of the Wayside that Vincent Odamtten argues achieves the effect of Brechtian alienation (Odamtten 1994, 24–25). As a play with a hybrid form, taken from dilemma tales, Ananse stories, classical Greek tradition, and African folk songs on slavery, among other cultural forms, The Dilemma of a Ghost performs these uneasy genealogies through form rather than expositional rehearsal (Okpewho 1983, Banham 2004, Gibbs 2009, Soyinka 1976).17 This hybrid form takes on the figure of ghosts in the play—literally the ghosts of slavery—haunting Ato because he refuses to do the work of translation, to take responsibility for the critical difference that the diaspora has made in his and his community’s history.18 Aidoo recognizes and sympathizes with Ato’s dilemma, seemingly between tradition and modernity, as she does the historian and writer’s dilemma of history rendered as merely “a game for two to play as the alien colonist project of appropriation was matched by an indigenous national project of counter-appropriation” (Guha 1997, 24). But Aidoo refuses this split in the very embodiment of Ato—the “been-to” who has been educated in the West and returned to Africa—and his encounter with an African history that is already “of the vanguard”: Much is gone You stranger do not know. Just you listen to their horn-blower: ‘We came from left

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We came from right We came from left We came from right The twig shall not pierce our eyes Nor the rivers prevail o’er us. We are of the vanguard We are running forward, forward, forward . . .’ (1995, 7–8) This passage sets up the temporal challenge to critical methodologies of diaspora that run throughout the play, where the variances of the past push through to a relentless futurity of the postcolonial moment of progressive political promise, Independence.19 African subjects, even of slavery’s pasts, refuse to be what Gayatri Spivak details as “objects” or “pure victims” (1999, 141), echoing Ranajit Guha’s subaltern anxiety over history, quoted earlier. This is a frustration they share with Derek Walcott, who also laments the limits of victimhood as a strategy for New World subjects: “They believe in the responsibility of tradition, but what they are in awe of is not tradition, which is alert, alive, simultaneous, but history, and the same is true of the new magnifiers of Africa” (1998, 42). Aidoo is prescient in her mapping of this nascent turn to Africa as static resource of tradition by diaspora audiences of 1964—and today. She critiques this stance not by denying “tradition” but by representing the dilemma of diaspora through form and through the very split it poses in interpretation, employing supposedly traditional forms in an innovative fashion (Allan 1994, 190). At the start of the third act, as the final song of the play lingers on the moment of “left” and “right,” or the ethical quandary of agency in the history of diaspora, the play suggests a stuck quality: Shall I go to Cape Coast, or to Elmina I don’t know, I can’t tell. I don’t know, I can’t tell. (Aidoo 1995, 28) Ato, the “been-to” postcolonial subject, ultimately embodies the dilemma of queering reproductive historicities, even as the disembodied Bird of the Wayside seems to be addressing Eulalie’s subject position as “stranger.” Each of these lyric moments is in closest proximity to a negotiation between a man and a woman or a boy and a girl about how to act, to proceed—in terms of either geography, leisure, or acts of

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cultural translation. Along with Eulalie’s brief, seemingly “possessed,” alcohol-fueled performance of slave history (when she “talks” to her deceased grandmother in a dreamlike state), these references to major slave-trading posts in Africa interrupt the play’s action and the forward “progress” of globalization with the queered relations that made such “choice” possible in the contemporary Ghana of the play. The dilemma, then, is not tradition versus modernity but instead the failure of postcolonial intimacies with those histories of slavery that Ato’s confrontation with the literally gendered ghosts of slavery represent.20 Aidoo renames the dilemma of black history not as pre- and postcontact with the West but as the hybrid site of multiple, difficult histories of gendered bodies. Colonial contact is one of these sites, but so are the existing structures of marriage, family, and community contracts that even the chorus women embody. Hence, Eulalie is no victim, or not the only one, as everyone in the play fails to do the difficult work across difference that may, the play suggests, be impossible to interpret in even the most local and personal of circumstances. The archive as such cannot solve the ghosts’ presence, in other words, as they live on in Eulalie’s grandmother (who speaks to her from the great beyond), in Eulalie herself, in the conventional wisdom of the rural community, and in the consciousness of the cosmopolitan diaspora subject. This couple in flux, throughout, asking left or right, this way or that way, worries the obvious lines of reproduction, lineage, and genealogy that undergird our constructions of diaspora history. Producing critical frames for diaspora, then, is the difficult work this play sets out. In arguing for display, description, and even deterioration over resolution, it manages to queer our critical desire for the etiological, for a coherent critical vantage point for diaspora studies, always keeping in mind transnational feminism’s critical calls for the radical contingency of location. In marking the historical significance of the slave trade’s British abolition in Dilemma’s 2007 iteration, the play insists on the continuing presence of the question of colonialism in shaping the strange contemporary fictions of race and place. This queering is one that posits Africa and histories of colonialism as viable past, present, and future contexts for a diaspora feminist thought, even as it critiques any easy notion of transnational coalitions born out of gender, race, or (trans)national belonging.21 Embracing incommensurability, The Dilemma of Ghost and Funnyhouse of a Negro reflect on the politics of their time with both sympathy and difficult formal challenges to narratives of racial, national, and Pan-African

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community. They deny a metaphoric chronology of diaspora experiences through the body that imagines itself as “healing” historical ruptures. Instead, these plays argue for dislocation as a critical strategy, neither collapsing difference (integration) nor reinforcing strict borders (segregation), neither retreating to the nation state nor positing essential connections through race or the experience of the raced body. This includes refusing us the heroines whom we perhaps want when envisioning the politics of black women’s history. Eulalie and Sarah do not “end” well; just as Carole Boyce Davies claims of Aidoo’s other dramatic heroine, Anowa, they are “suspended in time and history, over-determined by place/space constraints” (1994, 49). Leaving their audiences with a gnawing inertia or seeming passivity in the face of overwhelming, traumatic histories, they certainly offer bleak, narrow views of diaspora agency.22 But if we can refuse to read for the teleology of narrative, especially narratives of the body as the representable limit of the self, then we can read the plays as performing the impossibility of full translation that Brent Edwards lays out (2003a). For Kennedy and Aidoo, cultural-racial resolution is a constant impossibility, but not in a pessimistic vein (a charge that Aidoo, in particular, has contested).23 They call attention to the ways that bodies and histories do not align, how they erode under the necessary pressures of competing critical desires—feminist, postcolonial, ethnic, and American studies, as well as the weight of empire, collectively. In not privileging, performatively or textually, corporeal cohesion, Aidoo’s and Kennedy’s dramas call out the limits of history in defining the materiality of bodies and their currency in diasporic contexts. In their recombinant dramatic forms, they imagine new structures for describing and performing diaspora politics. That they were first performed in 1964, at the height of the political promise of Civil Rights and African Independence, only furthers their necessary interventions into assumptions about racial communities and their failures to cohere, then and in the present moment. Funnyhouse and Dilemma take stock of the ways that political discourse cannot account for the radical histories of difference that gender makes for “race” as a critical category. The plays posit a familiarity with history that always necessitates critical distance— alienated aesthetic strategies to sustain the constant potential of “the dilemma” of history for African diaspora studies. In this, they refuse the art of “commemoration” as an act of performing static visions of history. Instead, their versions of the past perform relentlessly embodied presents that warn us of the dangers of turning history into coherent narratives. Those narratives, even feminist

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and antiracist ones, necessarily compete with each other and fragment the subjects they name in their genealogical scopes. Funnyhouse and Dilemma do not deny such collective experiences of race as trauma but instead inhabit the modernity that such traumas have created. Good histories cannot be recovered, nor can they replace the existing fractured ones. Instead, we can dislocate the dramas of history via feminist performances of their surprising eruptions into the present. The next chapter considers this relentless presence of modernity through the lens of in many ways the literary pioneer of Difficult Diasporas, Zora Neale Hurston, and her reverberating legacy in the contemporary diaspora. Rather than putting feminism in tension with tradition and culture, the following fragmented narratives ask how black feminist aesthetics might question the very order of modernity itself, and its investment in segregating women and tradition from the political futures of race.

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Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity

It is the lack of symmetry which makes Negro dancing so difficult for white dancers to learn. The abrupt and unexpected changes. The frequent change of key and time are evidences of this quality. . . . Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when the whole is assembled it is lacking in symmetry. But easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo. —zora neale hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression”

Zora Neale Hurston begins her 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression” with an invocation of “drama”—not her own theater pieces or those Difficult Diasporas studied in the previous chapter, but instead the “drama” of black linguistic practice: “Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out. Unconsciously for the most part of course. There is an impromptu ceremony always ready for every hour of life. No little moment passes unadorned” (32). This incredibly brief and wholly unframed introduction to the drama of blackness is also littered, as with the quote on “asymmetry” in the epigraph, with nearly all of the cringe-worthy components of primitivist racial discourse, most notably the continual construction of an evolutionary progress narrative situating black folks as the original and stagnant point from which modernity and its linguistic and political forms develop. In this sense, it engages in the temporal problematic of anthropological practice that Hurston herself performs in her nonfiction work: the significance of documenting vernacular black culture to “preserve” a specific and undervalued history, at the same time that the modern social science of anthropology placed that documentation under the veil of disappearing, antiquated cultures whose time had past. In documenting black life away

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from urban centers, Hurston’s work threatened to commodify and hence help to eradicate the modern force of folk cultures.1 But throughout her literary and scholarly work, one finds Hurston insisting on these black performances’ significant place in the thoroughly modern/modernist time of the first half of the twentieth century. As “characteristic” par excellence (it is explicitly ranked first) for Hurston, “drama” sets up the asymmetrical relations of power that these contradictory modes of representation, recording, and reception of blackness entail in the discourse of twentieth-century modernity. Hurston, unlike the dramatists in the previous chapter, takes this up not by animating the force of colonial history but instead via a relentless presentism that insists on the simultaneity of cultural difference and on black aesthetic practice as the primary site to expose the temporal fictions of race, gender, and modernity. It is no coincidence, then, that Hurston’s example of “asymmetry” argues for a black modernity that is “accustomed to the break[s]” of aesthetic practice. To perform this requires a constant attention to the uneven exchanges between two perhaps unequal parts— a constant will to read the black diaspora differently. In her 1938 ethnography, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, and its aesthetic and political projects, as well as their postmodern fictionalization in Erna Brodber’s 1994 novel Louisiana, I would also like to think of asymmetry—“the abrupt and unexpected changes” that characterize the relationship of race and gender to modernity—as a method of reading these authors’ innovative critiques of the existing orders of modernity in the twentieth-century black diaspora. This invocation of black feminist critique requires not a retreat from but a total engagement with language and discourse, an immersion that is both dangerous in its threat to keep certain vernacular histories out of modernist narratives of politically viable subjectivity, and inescapable—asymmetrically possessing modernity not just via an interruption of its technological logics but by positing similarities across the twentieth-century Black Atlantic that deny the teleology of racial and gendered progress. I argue that the structure of these two texts alters and disrupts the sequence of modernity and its scripts of black women as modern subjects. For Hurston, and for Haiti, scenes of political and cultural revolution are interrupted by stagnant, uneven gender relations in the semipublic sphere. For Brodber, the “drama” comes from repeated narrative failures to translate the nuances of black feminist subjectivity and political engagement back to the dominant discourse of modernity. Exposing, as Diana Taylor puts it, both the fiction of “reciprocity” (2003, 60) and the

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“highly exaggerated difference” (Khair 2002, 122–23) between modernity and tradition in certain postcolonial and black feminist discourse, Louisiana and Tell My Horse use possession as middle ground in the confrontation with black modernity. Possession, marked as part of a premodern, fantastic tradition by dominant modernity and by nostalgic, anthropological recoveries of black folk culture, seems an odd meeting point. But for Hurston and Brodber, the nuanced cultural and social practices that surround and support possession as a performance illuminate its possibilities as a brief suspension of concepts of the individual self and the attendant embodiments of class, gender, and race, as well as an alternative set of “oral histories,” as Shirley Toland-Dix argues (2007, 200). As a collective resistance and a protected performance of colonial critique, as other important studies have thought about the contemporary uses of possession, it is decidedly a hybrid, flexible modern practice, able to be incorporated into counterdiscourses of modernity. For Hurston and Brodber, though, the romance of resistance is acknowledged but also reordered; both tradition and modernity, in their formulations, offer limited scripts for gendered agency, leaving black women subjects out of history and their present political moment. The resulting, uniquely hybrid construction of black modernity is one that acknowledges how race and modernity are constitutively linked and examines how narratives of that convergence are masculinized.2 Modernity, as Caribbeanist Sibylle Fischer outlines, comes “under the headings of colonial heterogeneity, displacement, and discontinuity,” a temporal era of “hypothesis” and “desire” that marks it as simultaneously innovative, insecure, and devastating (2004, 23). Hurston’s and Brodber’s reimaginings are not, then, about reasserting either a tradition linked to women or the modernity of “great women.” Instead, aligned with Barnor Hesse’s critique of a racialized modernity that still focuses on embodiment (for him, the visible difference of race [2007, 644]), the texts use possession to move away from the black, gendered body as definitive marker of difference, for good or for bad, and into an interrogation of how bodies participate in gendered structures of black modernity, negotiating the narrative boundaries of racial community and the Pan-African political ideologies that haunted the previous chapter. For Hurston, this intervention comes as an early critique of how blackness, and the invocation of African cultures and nonurban blackness as tradition, is mobilized in the service of a black politics that reproduces “culture heroes” (a Hurston term) of black masculinity across the diaspora. For Brodber, the reordering of the sequence of decolonization

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deconstructs the promise of black modernity as the romance of empire and imagines structural genealogies of black modernity that center alternatively gendered networks of political and cultural mobilization. The texts offer these new sequences not as escapes from modernity but as critiques from within that try to find ways out of the tradition/modernity bind where black women as subjects find themselves as the shadow sites in critical discourse. In Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, Hurston finds herself doing fieldwork in the Caribbean, specifically Jamaica and Haiti. It is here that Tell My Horse demonstrates a consistent commitment to mapping the minor and major transgressions of the black public sphere in all of its complexity, refusing to be a clean transcript for either white modernism or black cultural politics. Instead, Hurston moves to expose, enact, and describe the gendered and classed labor that goes into the making of black cultures and community, claiming those “dramas” as significant texts, ones that demand new modes of literacy, in the vein of Vevé Clark’s call to “diaspora literacy” as “a skill for both narrator and reader which demands a knowledge of historical, social, cultural, and political development generated by lived and textual experience” (1991, 42). But Hurston also questions that set of knowledges as a site of authenticity, staying committed to a literacy of internal, intraracial critique. In order to redistribute both the conceptual and material possession of race and gender in the diaspora, Hurston represents spirit possession as a practice of Vodou culture to be “read” through and as a metaphor for modern political agency within the diaspora. In this, she suggests what Joan Dayan later stated directly: “The possessed gives herself up to become an instrument in a social and collective drama” (1997, 19). Participation in the drama of the public sphere is a negotiation of power, trading varied registers of mobility in exchange for collective identification. If not quite enacting complete “reversals” of “western modernity” (Dayan 1995, 192), this tension between the individual and the social body, Hurston suggests, is the gendered conflict that drives black modernity with its necessary intersections of the material, conceptual, and psychic dimensions of participatory experience. Erna Brodber, in her 1994 novel Louisiana, enacts some large-scale drama of her own, on similar grounds—ethnography and the politics of black modernity. Told through a complicated series of narrative frames and voices, the text nearly fictionalizes Hurston’s ethnographic biography itself, imagining the black literary celebrity assimilating into the Vodou culture of her first field project, Mules and Men (1935), in New

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Orleans. Centered around the recording of a young anthropologist, Ella Townsend, and her “subject,” a former Marcus Garvey/Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) organizer, possession is at the heart of the drama of Louisiana’s genealogy of the black diaspora. Possessed by both the recently deceased Mammy and her dead Jamaican friend Lowly, Ella becomes “Louisiana,” medium to most of black New Orleans. Like the authors in the previous chapters, Brodber imagines a future by innovatively conjuring the archives of the past for the signs and traces of black women’s social and cultural memory. Both texts, then, ride an uneasy line between believing in the emancipatory possibilities of modernity and critiquing the limits of individual agency that attend to it. With modernity threatening to make a past of colonial violence merely “a metaphor,” Hurston and Brodber use mixed genre prose to connect material analysis to cultural production in the diaspora (Dayan 1995, 188–89). This tension also exists in their mutual descriptions of possession as a site of “transgressive knowledge” that is also bound by some of the gendered rules of local and global communities (Toland-Dix 2007, 192). The first half of this chapter tries to think through Hurston’s new uses for old representations of black modernity and its limits—Haiti and the black body as sites of modernity’s trouble with race—pointing out the continuity between modernity and diaspora-identified communities’ constructions of gendered power. The second half imagines Brodber’s dexterity with the tolls, genres, and forms of black modernity as a model of comprehending gender as a valuable and central subject of the modern drama of diaspora studies. These repossessions of black modernity in Tell My Horse and Louisiana stage practices of cultural literacy that insist on recognizing the asymmetry of public discourses on race and gender across the diaspora and, as such, on pivoting our attention to more quotidian and heterogeneous sites for us to stage diaspora and black women as the social and political subjects of its modern formations. Written after Hurston’s southern folklore tome Mules and Men and overlapping the composition of her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God,3 Tell My Horse is (or was) widely considered her “poorest” text—aesthetically, in terms of its form, and ideologically, in terms of its politics (Hemenway 1977, 248).4 Its combination of the ethnographic and the autobiographic, its modernist prose style fused to the travel narrative genre, augured its partial feminist and formalist recoveries in recent years as a text ahead of its time, in its anticipation of the contemporary

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form of autoethnography and self-reflexive anthropological practice in the postcolonial moment.5 Certainly, that is the contention of this book, which locates Hurston’s experimental form as an inaugural text of innovative, diasporic feminist politics. Hurston both engages and subverts the ethnographic impulse of modernism/modernity to describe and document the Other for use as a romantic (re)source, as practical foil, and as part of a self-referential practice of social science credibility. To do so, she relocates gender as central to the construction black political, social, and cultural community. Hurston produced Tell My Horse amid a wave of publicity regarding Haiti and its US occupation, with artists and intellectuals from dancer Katherine Dunham to poet Langston Hughes making trips to the country in the nineteen-thirties.6 As Millery Polyné and Hazel Carby note, Hurston’s sympathy toward the US imperial occupation cast her against the dominant African American political stance on the issue (Polyné 2010, 65; Carby 1990, 87). With even the NAACP arguing against occupation, and a long list of nineteenth- and twentieth-century race leaders traveling to and writing with rhetorical fascination of Haiti,7 the struggle to maintain Haiti as a possessed object of black modernity’s success in the eyes of the public state and print culture hovers around Hurston’s text. Ever the antagonist of her fellow Harlem Renaissance elite, Hurston intentionally treads on hallowed racial ground with her choice to conduct fieldwork in Haiti, and she confronts Afro-identified idealizations of the country head-on: Since the struggle began [in the late eighteenth century], L’Ouverture died in a damp, cold prison in France, Dessalines was assassinated by the people whom he helped to free, Christophe was driven to suicide, three more presidents have been assassinated, there have been fourteen revolutions, three out-and-out kingdoms established and abolished, a military occupation by a foreign white power which lasted for nineteen years. ([1938] 2009, 74) Hurston’s Haiti is a whole different league of what Amiri Baraka labels “vicious modernism” (2006, 59), or that which both gives voice to and exploits black cultural subjectivity in its “violent, transforming beauty” (De Jongh 2009, 2).8 But instead of a primitivist or a nostalgic “salvage” anthropology project, Hurston relocates black modernity to Haiti, site of the first black “nation” in and during the heart of chattel slavery.9 She does so not by rehearsing its completely “unique” past as a nation “created by slaves” (Mintz [1974] 1989, 73) but by bringing that past into a continuity with the

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present in Haiti itself, using the revolution’s history as more than a “pretext to talk about something else,” as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues of many who took up Haiti as a “cause” stuck in the past (1995, 97). Instead, Hurston thinks of Haiti as a Glissantian “point of entanglement,” a complex, hybrid site of New World cultural identity and history (Glissant 1989, 15). Even in outlining Haiti’s status as a failed state, Hurston creates the grounds for looking at it not just through the sign of revolution, or as the history of “great men” that critic David Scott insists misses the point, and the temporal significance, of the event: “The vindicationist story of the slave’s undaunted will to resist, however stirring and commendable it may be, obscures another and—in the context of our present—more important story, namely, a story about the transformed conditions (indeed the specifically modern conditions) in which the slaves were obliged to fight for freedom” (2004, 131).10 As a public intellectual, an anthropologist, and a provocateur in the black modernist era, Hurston’s questioning of Haitian history could and should be viewed through the lens of her recuperation as a black feminist subject in the past twenty-five years.11 Her feminist politics provide a sustained critique of the material and conceptual power of masculinity in Western modernity that has also, in her estimation, constructed the terms of debate in black modernity. Her turn to Haitian Vodou, then, is an act of regendering the primal scene of black freedom and narratives of political resistance. Relocating the odd temporality of “historical” crisis where Sidney Mintz rightly locates Haiti’s present political context ([1974] 1989, 73–74), Hurston imagines her own contemporary moment of Haiti through quotidian counterpublics of Vodou, folklore, and the constant presence not just of a violent past but of a dynamic cultural continuity that extends and exceeds “state” rule. She imagines Haiti, and blackness, not (just) as a teleology of History with a capital H, in other words, but as a modern state—and a state of racial politics (Konzett 2002, 81). Hurston investigates the “case” (in Mintz’s terms) of Haitian culture as insistently entangled in the conditions of the present, much as she does in “Characteristics”: “Negro folklore is not a thing of the past. It is still in the making. Its great variety shows the adaptability of the black man: nothing is too old or too new, domestic or foreign, high or low, for his use” ([1934] 2000, 36). Rather than fix the vernacular as authentic, Hurston here expands the timing, geographies, and cultural class of black history and black culture’s possible resources and resourcefulness. Blackness itself, as a practice of modernity for Tell My Horse, is nothing if not adaptable, as are Hurston’s own persistent methods of knowledge

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and cultural production. This twist of perspective, no longer just responding to Western preoccupations with normative forms of capital and democratic success, anticipates a Caribbean modernism coined by the likes of C. L. R. James and Wilson Harris, in which Afro-modernist cultures “develop as a narrative strategy and counter-discourse away from outmoded and conventional modes of representation associated with colonial domination and colonizing cultural structures” (Gikandi 1992, 5) rather than in response to white modernist experiments with a “primitive” Africanist past. Modernity is itself a form of charismatic possession, in Hurston’s hands, one possessed with “progress” and its failures, the speed and relative access to both political and material change. But as Patricia Chu astutely observes, primitivism emerges not simply as the foil by which modernity defines and congratulates itself but as the model for the modern individual subject who still has power to critique the status quo and, most importantly, the state (2005, 172). In this sense, the Haitian Revolution charismatically possesses Western modernity, effectively occupying the modern rhetoric of republican rights and its essential contradiction with the capital system that fuels modernity’s gains.12 But Hurston’s text remains uneasy with this characterization of Haiti, its revolution, and that event’s—and its leaders’—charismatic place in the logics of modernity. As Erica Edwards powerfully claims, “charisma” as an animating force and organizing concept in black life and literature runs hand in hand with individualist, masculine notions of leadership and resistance that have come to define black politics (2012, 3). It is this very construct that Hurston devotes herself to unmaking across her career— another way that we can mark her iconoclastic position vis-à-vis her fellow black authors and organizers of the time.13 Hurston writes out of this charismatic context, but also the one that possesses her contemporary writing on black political struggles over Haitian rights and status. A combination of “fantasy, paranoia, identificatory desires, and disavowal” hovers around Haiti as a simultaneous symbol of modernity and its discontents, a set of affectual historical responses that necessarily go beyond “events and causality in the strict sense,” following Fischer’s work on the effects of the Haitian Revolution on the rest of the Caribbean (2004, 2). Haiti is too often rendered as the lingering trace of black modernity’s failure, in the guise of anthropological interest in the “African” in the black diaspora, which forms into both covert and more obvious signs of rebellion. Tell My Horse moves toward what seems like an antithetical project of anthropological primitivism, but it does so insisting on the very modern

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charisma of Vodou and its uneasy and uneven intertwining with the more familiar trappings of the modern state. Tell My Horse demonstrates this connection partially by drawing out the amount of work that it takes to perform the primitive in rituals of possession: The usual routine is this: The spirit enters the head of a person. He is possessed of this spirit and sometimes he or she is troubled by it because the possession comes at times and places that are, perhaps, embarrassing. On advice, he goes to a houngan and the spirit is identified and the “horse” is advised to make food for the loa who is the master of his head. As soon as the person is financially able, he or she goes through the ceremony of baptism known as “getting the head washed.” Three days before the reception of the degree, the candidate presents himself to the houngan, who receives him and makes certain libations to the spirit who has claimed the candidate. ([1938] 2009, 174–75) Far from exotic or romantic descriptions of ritual, Hurston transforms Vodou and spiritual possession into modern “routine.” She renders a site of primitivist fascination—possession—banal. And, indeed, the histories of spirit possession are too numerous to name, found in Judaism, the Ibo people, Vietnam, Brazil, India, French Catholicism (there is even a black Joan of Arc whom Hurston devotes a chapter to), and, of course, American religious practice. As such, possession is not so much a particular of blackness or even the primitive associations it maintains but a practice that has adapted its meaning across geographic and temporal difference into modernity. Its history, as such, for Hurston, constantly possesses her present-day observations—falling in line with what Jenny Sharpe has identified as “history as spirit possession,” an epistemology animated by the few lingering traces, as well as the absence, of evidence surrounding displaced cultural identities (2003, 1). Hurston’s presence is needed to claim a rather ordinary history—“an invented genealogy” (ibid., 42)—that fits, albeit unevenly, within the structures of modern life in the Caribbean as, in Daphne Lamothe’s terms, a “site of culture” for the diasporic world (2008, 1). The routine possession described in the quote from Tell My Horse refuses to center the charismatic black leader or to romanticize black “tradition” in a nostalgic move to mark the folk as a similar site/invocation of authenticity. It also has an intertextual history to claim as well: Hurston’s own initiation past the first “degree” of Vodou priestess

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as recounted in her 1935 collection of southern folklore and Louisiana Hoodoo, Mules and Men. Though Tell My Horse does let us know that the narrator may “go Canzo,” ([1938] 2009, 174), the second degree of initiation, in passing, Hurston’s narrative distances herself as the subject of a possessed episode swiftly. In fact, Hurston remains publicly unpossessed throughout the text, vacillating between narrative modes of scientific inquiry, journalistic distance, and personal curiosity. Rather than claiming her space in Vodou ritual as an initiate, Hurston maintains her difference—as American, as anthropologist, and, particularly in Tell My Horse, as a woman. The “he or she” slips into the routine (along with a mention of money), suggesting the tension Tell My Horse locates in its description of Vodou as a social structure and practice in Haiti: the promise of equal access against the material conditions of gender and class hierarchy.14 In this, Hurston locates Vodou (and diaspora) as relentlessly modern and as an allegory/doppelganger for black political community in the United States. Possession only holds currency within complex structures of meaning, ones that exceed the defining presence of what Hurston calls “culture heroes,” the title of a chapter in Tell My Horse. These men (as they all are) are a source of power for black cultural and political life, but Tell My Horse marks an even sharper turn in Hurston’s work toward a skepticism of a black modernity imagined as the charismatic rhetorical presence of individual subjects, including her own authorial exceptionalism. The powerful men of the text are, like the male characters of her novels, guilty of “their preconscious eagerness to embrace the worst aspects of a system inherently inimical to their interests” and “seduc[ed] by some aspect of the imperative of capital” (Grant 2004, 119). Tell My Horse’s explicit critique emphasizes this position but also her impatient structure (as here she cannot, as Grant astutely notes about her fiction, exact supernatural justice on political figures). She layers many stories, rather than building one massive critique, resisting the charismatic pull of narrative herself. It is no surprise that Erica Edwards finds this charisma acting through the power of narrative performance or that Hurston (and Brodber) seek, in their unusual forms, to reorder these “fictions” of the necessary organizing of black politics around masculinity. Possession is a mark of the rite of passage for “race leaders” in the view of critics such as Houston Baker, in a gloss that would make Hurston and her suspicion of empty language and powerful men roll over; one must, like Martin Luther King, Jr., be “touched by the frenzy of black spiritual existence” manifested through “rhetorical effectiveness” (H. Baker 1994, 25). Possession, then, becomes a

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“style” that “makes one recognizable and resonant before a spirited mass audience” (ibid., 25–26).15 Of course, possession is a remarkably flexible signifier for Tell My Horse and its depicted audiences, its range extending as a figure of success, threat (both direct and indirect), unconscious voice, regulation, evil, or spiritual power and potential. But for Hurston, it is not the “frenzy” of the charismatic speaking subject that is rendered resonant in Tell My Horse but the “mass audience.” She recounts a moment of “evil” possession during a ceremony with Dieu Donnez (a houngan), treating both him and the possessed body with far less interest than she registers for the power of the group in response to the public performance: “But that was not all. A feeling had entered the place. It was a feeling of unspeakable human fears, and the remarkable thing was that everybody seemed to feel it simultaneously and recoiled from the bearer of it like a wheat field before a wind” ([1938] 2009, 144). Group action becomes the “remarkable” or recognized moment of drama. Hurston shifts to the “audience”—“a necessary part of any drama,” as she says in “Characteristics” under the heading of “Absence of the Concept of Privacy” ([1934] 2000, 39)—while never losing sight of the major players, continuing, The fear was so humid you could smell it and feel it on your tongue. But the amazing thing was that the people did not take refuge in flight. They pressed nearer Dieu Donnez and at last he prevailed. The man fell. His body relaxed and his features untangled themselves and became a face again. They wiped his face and head with a red handkerchief and put him on a natte. . . . They poured libations for the dead and the ceremony ended. ([1938] 2009, 144) The descriptive rhetorical force belongs to “the crowd” and “the people.” Donnez may prevail, but “they pressed,” “they wiped,” and “they poured libations” and closed the event. Yet even as Tell My Horse is didactic about support for “the majority” and political “compromise” at moments, it is also unromantic about the will and “intelligence” of the crowd, as such (74). No easy community, the possessive audience is shown to labor before, during, and after a possession, in order to create the very circumstances of the performance. The performer is, in many ways, beside the point for the text, and the possessive audience can then gain too much power; as Hurston notes in her titular section, “Gods always behave like the people who create them” (219). Possession, like subjection, is a paradox, not just the unilateral application of external power hailing the internal subject but also produced through the ambivalent desire to become a subject,

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to submit oneself to an understandable discourse of, in this case, group identity (Butler 1994, 19). Power is both internal and external, an ambivalent relationship that Hurston unflinchingly narrates. Too much giving way to either charismatic force or audience participation can also lead to death or dispossession—emblematized in the curious cases of Haitian “zombies” that Hurston painstakingly addresses in Tell My Horse. Dayan (1995), Strongman (2008), and other critics read zombies as a reaction to and representation of the postcolonial condition, subject to uncertain governance and the anthropological gaze, a kind of literal performance of Orlando Patterson’s conception of “social death.” Hurston insists on their lively and immediate present, on an allegory of black diaspora social cultural relation in the realm of modernity, infused with but not strictly analogous to colonized history—Jamaican color lines, Haitian class divides, the US occupation of the island that ended just the year before Hurston arrived (Emery 2005, 330). Her zombies are resilient, threats to “upper class Haitians” of the incomplete project of capitalism and enlightenment, the wholesale ability to make new what seems dead, past, unthinkable, obsolete (Hurston [1938] 2009, 181). Her often contradictory and difficult views on all three examples perform obvious breaks with her contemporary (and certainly our contemporary) critics of black modernity and imperialism, refusing the flattening effect of a predictable audience and challenging our “conceptual” political alignment with contemporary readings of Hurston.16 Hurston’s anecdotes about fake mountings, scientifically explainable zombies, stones that wear dresses and urinate, and marriages between goats and family members of the heads of state are not the real subversive narrative behind her somehow party-line imperialism. They are part of Hurston’s formal and conceptual strategy of understanding the imbricated nature of the charismatic state and its subjected community—the dynamics of “fear and loss” that pervade the scripts of authority within the complex modernity of the Americas (Humphries 2011, 39). These two cultures, she demonstrates, are parts of a whole, constantly reflecting back on each other in public and in private, with all of the attendant hierarchies coming through, be they the houngan’s will or America’s occupation of Haiti. For her, structure and resistance are both part of the text, and part of the institution of modernity, particularly the contradictions of black modernity. Tell My Horse’s feminist politics demand such asymmetrical and sometimes contradictory sites of change, refusing hardened categories of the state and the people, or even imperialism and autonomous democracy. Both are possessed, internally and publicly,

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by the discourses of gendered and classed power, from which there is no easy escape or for which there is no easy narrative form, as Tell My Horse’s aesthetic choices attest. One critic says of Mules and Men that it is “a textual paradigm of the functionality of US black folk culture” (Rowe 2000a, 8)—but is the failing text of Tell My Horse then about the dysfunction of diaspora? Or does diaspora act as a vision of the difficulty of difference within difference, part of the complex process of racial signification that Henry Louis Gates Jr. theorizes via Ralph Ellison as “the blackness of blackness” (1988, 236–37)? In Tell My Horse, diaspora exposes the multiple myths of national and transnational unity/progress, articulating the dangerous work of relying too much on past success—“the greatest progress” line that Hurston skewers US “race leaders” for using ([1938] 2009, 77)—or a detached, obstinate present, as when she identifies the practice of “lying” as the greatest weakness of Haiti, whose people “have no memory of yesterday and no suspicion of tomorrow” ([1938] 2009, 81).17 These rhetorical temporalities—to use Baker’s terms, the “mythomania” (1994, 74)—fail black modernity at the level of “action” (for the people), though Hurston herself is unsure of how to proceed, as evidenced by her at times aggressive elitism surrounding the vague concept of “intelligence” and at other points sensitive readings of black literacy’s role in enacting social and political change on a mass scale. For Hurston, there is no way out of modernity’s rhetorical or material power—only the critical possession and critique of the excessive charisma of power.18 Until now, I have focused on the reckoning and revision that Hurston does in rendering the charismatic power of seemingly singular bodies, objects, and states. Her text inverts and even exploits these signs of hierarchal structure to lay out potentially feminist visions of black modernity. These hegemonic asymmetries—their unequal possessions of Tell My Horse, as well as of diaspora studies—play out in the formal and structural dramas of the text and in what these uneven “failures” of charismatic narrative presence might suggest about the intertwined futures of gender and race in diaspora studies. When Hurston takes on the nonfiction voice in Tell My Horse, she refuses charisma, or a totalizing, linear version of that rhetorical force. Unlike, for instance, Maya Deren’s late modernist work on Vodou ritual, Divine Horsemen (1953), Hurston also refuses to write the catalogue of Haitian ritual, the textbook that isolates Haiti and imagines its culture exhausted and without connection to even the rest of the Caribbean,

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let alone its present political moment. Hurston seems bored, in fact, by her own theory/practice division—the conceptual versus the dramatic. That impatience, and her own model of political and social engagement, comes to fruition most publicly in Tell My Horse’s fragmented and mixed generic claims. Many critics, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his afterword to the Harper and Row edition of the book, attribute this to a kind of tragic sloppiness: “In fact, Hurston’s life . . . reveals how economic limits determine our choices even more than does violence or love. Put simply, Hurston wrote well when she was comfortable, wrote poorly when she was not. Financial problems . . . produced the sort of dependence that affects, if not determines, her style” (1990, 298). And, in fact, we might not be far off from what Hurston herself seemed to recognize about not just her own work but the so-called “folk” culture she studied. The vernacular does not stand outside of what Houston Baker calls “the economics of slavery” but instead situates them as simultaneous events ([1984] 1987, 28). When cultural expression is possessed by economic need, a particularity is produced, a rubric, a style, a local difference. Instead of viewing “creativity and commerce” as “antimonies,” we could perhaps view them as Hurston does—necessary and mutual social dramas, whether produced for intracommunity currency or reproduced (by her) in a transnational framework, the condition of modernity pushing the conditions for art and vice versa (H. Baker [1987] 1999). This is not to say that there are no ramifications to that imbalance in representative and economic power, but it is, for Tell My Horse, a significant distinction as it continually represents cultural production—be it in the form of Vodou, politics, wild boar hunts, or curried goat feeds—as structured internally by class and gender difference.19 Hurston’s text engages in large-scale structural asymmetry, from its anemic section on Jamaica to its sprawling two-thirds on the “politics and personalities of Haiti” and “Voodoo in Haiti.” As Vodou is clearly the “draw” of the book, why even present Jamaica? The answer comes in the form of the comparative, as Hurston contemplates what is in her estimation a decidedly unmodern maroon settlement and wonders aloud about the conceptual versus the material power of revolution. Diasporic reception as well as colonial histories make Jamaica and Haiti asymmetrical modernities, with the Jamaican narrative allowing Hurston to outline the dangers of romantically maintaining perpetual and uncomplicated narratives of revolution. The text does this in part by speaking from a point of failure (Jamaica does not gain full independence until 1962) before the “success” of Haiti, the first black republic. That there

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are grave similarities between the two in the realm of the social, in particular, is Hurston’s unspoken link between the uneven sections. Beyond geographic proximity, then, there is the conceptual and structural proximity that Tell My Horse implicitly imposes and invites. Hurston is elsewhere noted for her prowess at signifying, but her larger formal concerns remain difficult for critics to read in the case of Tell My Horse, partially because they feel resolved about the American vernacular and Hurston’s recovery position in her other work, and the diasporic context of Horse leaves them unsure of how to read Hurston’s politics on global black modernity and US imperialism (Rowe 2000b). Nowhere is this rendered more strange than in her sudden shift to direct comparison of US and Caribbean gender relations in the last chapter of the “Jamaica” section, “Women in the Caribbean.” Immediately following the description of funeral rites in what seems to be “Pocomania” or indigenously inspired religious practice, Tell My Horse switches rhetorical gears. Leading up to chapter 5, we have only been given short quips of witty and incisive political observation in an otherwise part travelogue, part celebrity-ethnographer narrative. Without any warning but the chapter title, we are told, “It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States. It has been said that the United States is a large collection of little nations, each having its own ways, and that is right. But the thing that binds them all together is the way they look at women, and that is right, too” ([1938] 2009, 57). From the feminist hero/author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, this nationalist celebration of the United States’ forward-thinking gender politics seems strange indeed. But again, if we think of Hurston’s larger project of asymmetry, this is the moment of conflated identities before the break: the United States is just a “collection” of nations, like the Caribbean, and the “little nation” that Hurston is most interested in is that of the black public sphere. Allowed access to white institutions, Hurston’s frustration with the lack of rhetorical power of women in black political movements and social-cultural politics is laid bare throughout the book.20 Hurston is trying to think of another metaphor, besides the “rooster’s nest” of masculine-colonialist imitation, another model for thinking gender in black diasporic modernity. In her forced transition, she finds it. As the “only woman” allowed to participate in the goat feed, or to hunt wild boar, in the previous “Jamaica” sections, the funeral chapter is much less ostentatious about the author’s exceptionalism. The funeral rites are a long, involved process, demanding group participation in elaborately preparing the dead to stay dead, for as Hurston puts it, “It all

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stems from the firm belief in survival after death. Or rather that there is no death. Activities are merely changed from one condition to the other” ([1938] 2009, 43). Rather than the finality of a single revolutionary act, or the fixed position of gender roles, Hurston’s asymmetry suggests that social politics are an ongoing process. Hurston fans the flame of US national feminist pride (if there can be said to be a fire at all) instead of racial nationalism and myths of progress in an attempt to allow less visible, and less “official,” shifts in modernity—and nascent development discourse—come to the forefront. Above all, in the death rituals, there is a sociability, one that is inflected with all of the sexual and gendered relations that exist (older women try to keep track of younger ones, for instance) among the people and among a more symbolic order, where a ceremonial stick’s “name is always feminine. It is named for some mule or horse or obeah woman” (52).21 In the wake of communal events that seem to write women out of significant performance, there comes a “break” in the ceremony: “A few warming-up steps by some dancers. Then a woman breaks through the dancers with a leap like a lioness emerging from cover. Just like that. She sings with gestures as she challenges the drummers, a lioness defying the tribesmen” (53). Obviously a scripted possession of the community stage, the moment not only recognizes the performative force here, a charismatic woman “whipping” the audience into a mass possession, but also underscores the various other, unseen labor that Hurston documents women doing throughout, including herself—from making a dead man’s shirt to decorating the ritual space, from being mounted as a possessed “horse” to finding sexual pleasure and connection in “the crowd” of ritual. There is decidedly room for alternate performances of gender and modernity in transitional and transnational spaces in Tell My Horse, inasmuch as there are still parallels to other, less generous metaphors of sexual and corporeal possession.22 In the “Women in the Caribbean” section, Hurston writes of one anecdotal exchange, “Up in a safe little spot he induced her to leave the car after a struggle and possessed her” (60), lamenting that even in the realm of black modernity, “she cannot refute his statement. What could she offer as proof?” (61). The modern condition for black women in relation to sexuality and the state, then, follows a trajectory of madness and death in the narrative. But Hurston’s juxtapositions attempt to retain the promise of a “change” of activities, so that black woman’s inability to register on the scale of charismatic rhetorical force as political subjects is transmuted via Hurston’s poetics of transition.23 Tell My Horse, then, finds not just the detached imperialism of

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anthropology but a mode of critical participation through proximity and transition. If Hurston’s Tell My Horse rides an uneasy and asymmetrical line between believing in the possibilities of charismatic public possessions and a critique of the finer distinctions of such an individualizing practice, Erna Brodber’s Louisiana is perhaps less ambivalent about the potential power of transliterate charismatic leadership, if he or she (or it) can find, as it were, the proper “site,” or discipline, for possession. In fact, the novel itself is possessed by Hurston’s specific legacy, a sort of what-if fantasy and “allegorical revision” (Roberts 2006, 223) that imagines that Hurston took Luke Turner up on his offer to stay and practice Vodou in Mules and Men, instead of returning to academia and literary celebrity: at the end of chapter 2 of Mules and Men, the narrator opines, after her initiation, “He wanted me to stay with him to the end. It has been a great sorrow to me that I could not say yes” (Hurston [1935] 1990, 205). Hurston’s textual “sorrow” is transformed, in Louisiana’s narrative, into what appears to be possession as a break from modernity, but it is more a relocation of modernity (on par with Jackie Kay’s) from Harlem to New Orleans, and hence from “race men” to powerful black women.24 Possessed more with alternative knowledges than political acumen, Louisiana’s structure suggests a still conscripted but diasporically informed drama of black modernity—one that relocates diaspora history in the practices of black women’s ethnography and anthropology, fraught as those disciplines may be (McClaurin 2001). Hurston struggles with her critique of the emptiness of “race men” discourse at the same time that she sees no other vehicle for the public progress of black modernity—including her ambivalent presentation of her own authorial charisma. Brodber here takes up Hurston-as-contemporary-celebrity—“race woman,” as it were. So while the link between Hurston and Ella Townsend, Louisiana’s Columbia-educated, WPAendorsed traveling anthropologist, hovers around the narrative for the reader, Brodber’s text also imagines the making of Ella’s own charismatic leadership by divine diasporic intervention and interaction: My mind is on vacation: the rest of me sits around in Madame’s parlour singing and talking with her guests, still mainly West Indian and though that mind knows that I am now a celebrity with them and that they are waiting, it does nothing. I too wait. A different waiting from that in St. Mary. There I didn’t know what was the

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expected end. Here I know precisely what is expected of me. New Orleans is different in that way. There is another difference too. Here I know that I can deliver. I don’t know when or even what, but I know that I will deliver. ([1994] 1997, 97) Abandoning official rhetorics, Louisiana represents a semiotics of “celebrity” in which recognition is not the goal but the medium of modernity’s power—and, in this case, a galvanizing force or helpful magnet for diverse diaspora experience. Finding the global in the novel’s localized version of celebrity, charismatic possession is both definite and not fully tapped, like black modernity’s generative potential. Assuredly, Brodber’s Hurston-with-a-difference epitomizes the strange “problem” of individual charisma in collective and conceptual black diaspora feminist thought. While it is elite, Harlem-centered institutional modernity that equips Ella with the tools and opportunity for possession by diasporic force (both by the circumstance of her recording for the WPA and through the tape recorder that serves as both proof and medium of her perception) in Brodber’s narrative, it is her temporary abandonment of her dependence on such materials which brings Ella’s “diaspora literacy” (Clark 1991). Her ability to see and connect transnationally comes not through the technologies of travel, or the archive, but through not “writing” and not “thinking”—through what the narration refers to as “worthlessness” in the face of modernity’s productivity standards ([1994] 1997, 97). Brodber has Ella retreat, self-consciously, to the sort of hypertraditional here, assuming gender-role status as the kept wife with no sense of the world beyond her immediate doorstep. But this, too, belies the fiction of the modern diaspora: Ella’s insular world is more diasporic than any she had been able to “read” previously, despite her early infancy spent in Jamaica and her immigrant parents. Staying put and staying home are or, more importantly, can be read as diasporic acts—feminist engagements with the global, with the possessive and direct power of diaspora informing them. Much as Ella’s locally based charismatic power is mutually dependent on her husband Reuben’s more colonized engagements with the cultural “stuff” of black modernism, namely, jazz and blues recording, Louisiana’s narrative holds a larger, more traditional diasporic black celebrity as its metahaunting frame: Marcus Garvey. The complex narrative frame of Louisiana begins with a fictional editor’s note, followed by a transcript of possession, then alternating possessive interludes with first-person narration from either the character Ella/Louisiana or Reuben, her husband

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and compiler of the fictional manuscript (as well as of a brief sociological sketch within the novel). It is this part of the chapter, “Ah who say Sammy dead,” where we not only shift from Louisiana, Ella’s New Orleans composite identity consisting of her and her possessors, but also Reuben’s rusty “field” voice, along with Ella’s sketch of Mammy post-“discovery” of the Garvey mystery that has been the narrative’s subtext and the cause for Ella’s initial WPA-sponsored contact with her mount. Brodber has Reuben’s character transcribe both the possessed utterance of Garvey’s name and Ella’s reaction: So. So. There it is. Finally out. I looked at Louisiana. She was smiling. That was Mammy and how she came to be of interest to those looking for the history of the black people of South West Louisiana. Not even fifteen minutes. Louisiana had waited and waited, must be, fifteen years for this. Mammy was a Garvey organizer and a psychic. We had long known about the latter. A black nationalist. Well, well, well. “The units,” Louisiana mumbled. “What units did she set up?,” Louisiana had asked herself over and over. “Why couldn’t the answer have surfaced before?” ([1994] 1997, 148) Reuben’s reaction, full of repetitive stutters and stalls in the face of Garvey’s charismatic connotation, reframes and reiterates Mammy’s story as one “waiting” to be possessed by a broader modern meaning. But what are we to make of the phantom presence of “Mr. G” (148) in the nested narrative strategies of Louisiana? Is Brodber’s transnational feminist vision of diaspora utilizing a legitimating “race man” to inject importance to the “minor” global contribution of women’s work organizing within local communities? Like Tell My Horse, Louisiana betrays a simultaneous radical mistrust of systemic figures and narratives and an inescapable draw toward “better” versions of such structures and their charismatic representatives—or a least better uses for the iconoclastic leaders who possess dominant narratives about black modernity. Whereas Hurston’s narrative expresses hope in the form of the “new” Haitian elite, Brodber’s delineates fantastical counterreadings of diasporic movement and connection. Less oppositional than coterminous, Brodber’s relocations of Hurston’s (implicit) and Garvey’s legacies to a black American print culture and politics of the late seventies (when the prologue identifies the publication of the fictional manuscript at a black feminist press) specifically hails a black feminist context—the right publisher at the right time, the boom of late-seventies black feminist public and print activity. Hurston and Garvey, for Brodber, are visionaries of

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black modernity, possessing not just the slim space of their own public lifetimes but the (near) present moment of diaspora studies as well. But Brodber’s revision of public possessions is no less evident—from Hurston’s transformation into folk culture heroine Ella to the withholding of Garvey’s name throughout all but the last fifteen pages of the narrative. Garvey, disgraced and deported in the waning years of his prominence, is not quite remembered as one of the conceptual forefathers of modern diaspora studies, like Franz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, or W. E. B. Du Bois. Instead, Garvey’s speeches are reproduced in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, for instance, with a certain skepticism surrounding his focus on business and capital and his somewhat overblown rhetorical style; the preface to his work describes him as a “most controversial figure,” “a marginal demagogue” with “crude aesthetics” whose rhetoric somehow manages to exceed his practical “failure,” evidenced by his inclusion in the anthology (Gates and McKay 2004, 995, 996). Brodber herself, however, has written frequently on Garvey’s significance, not (just) as a West Indian hero abroad but as a symbol of a diaspora “whose boundaries were extended beyond seas” (2003, 75). Garvey is the ultimate sign of diaspora for Brodber, creating what she deems in her scholarly work “a continent of black consciousness” out of working-class and immigrant blacks in nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties America. His originality, she argues, is found not in his individuality but in his organizing (102). Repeating herself much as she has Reuben do upon discovery of the Garvey connection, Brodber marvels twice in a single paragraph at the scope and scale of Garvey’s political network: “Who were the people in the 74 branches of the UNIA in Louisiana? . . . Who was in the 74 branches of the UNIA in Louisiana?” (83). Brodber’s captive fascination with Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, connects directly with her investment in the potential of modern disciplines such as anthropology: she sees Garvey-as-possessor as a means to more names, more dates, more history, and a deeper genealogy of Caribbean and US connections, especially for working-class and feminist histories (99). Her form mirrors the disenchanted narrative of science and history as a system of sameness. Brodber’s fictional social science is one of radical continuities, rhetorically portable and yet recognizable beyond the frame of “culture hero” charisma. If, for Hurston, the inevitable emphasis is on rhetorical power and its distribution, not to race men but to the “lying” people, for Brodber, the focus is structural. Her use of Garvey emphasizes not so much the

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rhetorical or even the symbolic power of a long-dead culture hero but instead his structural triumphs and legacy. For Brodber, Garvey’s “difference” is in the organization he created for working-class blacks in the United States and the West Indies, an organization which itself was diasporic not just because of Garvey’s West Indian citizenship and back-toAfrica goals but because of its ability to create community among West Indians on US soil and between working-class blacks and immigrants. Brodber mirrors this sentiment from her academic work in the structure of the narrative itself, which, we find out, is brought into being because of Mammy and Lowly’s link to the Garvey organization and academic and state institutions’ investment in Garvey as a political figure worth documenting. Louisiana’s interest in the galvanizing force of organized charisma betrays its investment in the tools and performance of black modernity as a public and popular concept. Brodber’s fantasies of connection through Garvey extend through culture, not just proletariat politics— or culture-as-proletariat politics: “The relationship between AfricanAmericans and I was now more than the fantasy of being a singing female Platter: I was by association with Garvey a celebrated part of the family” (2003, 77). Brodber possesses Garvey’s West Indianness with the belated power of diasporic meaning akin to black music of the nineteenfifties and nineteen-sixties. The seemingly (more) democratic routes of travel—print culture, parades, community organizing for Garvey, radio for music—that these popular forms take for Brodber are also akin to the Vodou community and economy she imagines in Louisiana.25 In this, she attempts to map what critic Heather Smyth refers to as Brodber’s and others’ revision of masculinist Caribbean theories of difference that do not distinguish those variations in power and privilege that create difference (2002, 3). In Louisiana, the “conflicts of interest” between black communities across the diaspora are evident, especially in the difficult and exhausting work it takes to forge affiliation, for the plot and for the novel’s readers (ibid.). There is no power without audience for Brodber, no charismatic presence without a necessary body of the possessed—a model of organization in which Garvey and UNIA “maintain a constant presence” through modern media (Krasner 2002, 182). But the trick of charisma, even in eminent sociologist Max Weber’s estimation, is to possess outside of a singular identity or moment, “to transform charisma and charismatic blessing from a unique, transitory gift of grace of extraordinary times and persons into a permanent possession of everyday life” (1968, 1121).

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Brodber’s wish is to claim a more “permanent” historical and conceptual rubric for Garvey’s presence in diasporic communities, including her own. As Louisiana’s aesthetics of the partial, the proximate, and the contingent suggest, though, that temporality of possession is, in fact, beyond individual will or plot—and hence, it remains temporary. But as Brodber’s connection to the one “female Platter” attests, she revises Garvey as a black feminist hero and model of organizing. It is not Garvey himself but his organization’s ability to locally distribute power and diasporic literacy to Mammy or Jamaican-born Lowly that is significant under the umbrella of perhaps problematic assertions of masculine possession and repossession. Louisiana enacts a deconstruction of that very hierarchy, one also repeated by the houngan-as-hero structure that Tell My Horse cautions against.26 In other words, Brodber’s text does not construct a narrative of black charismatic possession as necessarily resistant but rather as the sum of its moving, asymmetrical parts and how they figure and reorganize black modernity. Garvey’s possessive act even gets recast as traditionally “women’s work”: “[I] left, wanting to pull the sides of the sea together, wanting to sew them little islands together and tack them on to New Orleans. Them and that tavern! ‘Women,’ I say, ‘Why can’t you make quilt from scraps like other women?’ ‘The work,’ they say, ‘Gotta do the work what with him gone.’ And I just a mere man could not resist them” ([1994] 1997, 148). With Silas, Mammy’s husband, speaking “through” the medium of Louisiana, we can read Brodber’s largest revision of not just Garvey’s legacy but black political modernity, made of women’s work after the “failure” of charismatic masculinity (Garvey’s deportation)—a continuity marked by difference. Here, that difference is decidedly gender. Like Brodber’s intellectual and cultural identification with and insertion of herself into The Platters’ imaginary (and akin to Kay’s imaginative reclaiming of Nelson Mandela in the first chapter), Louisiana casts the subject of black modernity as fragmented and feminist, as doing the “work” of diaspora (sewing those islands together) after conventional means of archival and cultural history—namely, print culture—fail to document working-class women’s own charismatic presences. Brodber’s Garvey reference serves another, larger purpose, one embodied in the form and frame of Louisiana—the question of modernity’s cultural reception. Print culture, academic disciplinarity, technologies of travel, and various archival practices are the empathic sites of diaspora here, and not merely as celebration or lamentation over a mythic, lost past of diasporic connection. Spirit possession, far from occupying

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the past, is resolutely present—and literal—in Louisiana’s construction of black modernity. In fact, the novel suggests that spirit possession is itself a practice of this modernity, of those initiated into “literacy”: “the quintessence of cosmopolitanism” in a world organized through difference (Behrend and Luig 1999, xiv). The powerful force of possession is in its dissemination into “everyday life” in Brodber’s and Hurston’s textual worlds (Weber 1968, 1121). This multimedia approach to possession is embodied nowhere as much as in the recording machine entrusted to Ella Townsend when she goes out in the field to collect Mammy’s story that serves as the organizing technology of the narrative, even and especially in its failure. Rather than reading the presence of modern technology as an intrusion of the colonial/state power into a somehow untouched field, Louisiana attempts to relocate some of technology’s power in service of local diasporas. Like Hurston’s documentation and use of zombies, technology can both “prove” the existence of local knowledge in post-Enlightenment terms and attempt to recast critical mistrust of the modern that permeates some postcolonial discourse on the subaltern.27 It is not just, for Louisiana, that technology delivers a kind of simultaneous experience of previously held national cultural identity (like a soccer game or the Olympics in Appadurai’s Modernity at Large [1996]) but that it can both archive and transmit more imaginative connections—or become the site and the method. For Louisiana, technology may be intended to build the Garvey archive, the modern history of great-men-as-symbols of black diasporic community, but it is subverted or redirected into a complex documenting of poor and rurally decentered women’s connections through and beyond the famous “Mr. G.” The first step, for Brodber and for this discussion of the revaluation of the tools of modernity, is to consider the method of collection, the means of the archive: the tape recorder. As a “realist prop” of the state (Kutzinski 2001, 71), Ella is ceremoniously awarded this new gadget for her WPA assignment, “one of the few to be given the new field aid, an approximation of today’s tape recorder” (Brodber [1994] 1997, 3). This recorder possesses the frame, in both senses of the word, as it drives the overt narrative as well as the structure of the novel, which, just after the “prologue” from the black women’s press, proceeds with a lengthy “transcription” of a tape reel documenting Ella’s possession by Mammy and Lowly. Like Hurston’s boastful pictures of zombies in Tell My Horse, the tape recording attempts to eliminate narrative explanations of madness, mendacity, or primitiveness: “[The] voices on the reel were there for all

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to hear and verify; that the only singular experience I had had was of saying things of which I feel I have no knowledge and that I should wait and watch before committing myself to a path that could label me mad or at best odd. I let myself be comforted by that momentarily” (31–32). Denying all but the charisma of possession, Ella’s fictional, “singular experience” still means little without the shared experience of witnessing possession via modern technology. But rather than recording a fetishized “live” event, in Louisiana, the possession itself is mechanical: “The machine pulled out those words, that thought out of me and in my voice,” Ella reports when we come to “her” explanation after the transcript, later asking, “Was this another apartment in the surrealistic world into which the recording machine had plummeted me?” (33, 65). Giving her agency over to the modern only to be possessed by the notso-distant past, the narrative infuses technology, as in Brodber’s “spirit telephone” in her earlier novel, Myal (1988), with a charismatic power that, like Garvey, becomes not just an immediate force but one able to link the past, present, and future. Even as the narrative voice insists on the tape recorder’s material presence and value—and its veracity—the articulation of technology’s “magical” properties is also repeated throughout the text. Brodber’s representation of technology refuses to fall into the trope of “native” suspicion or superstition in the face of modernity; it is the “folk” who manipulate and manifest the technological device, and the educated elite such as Ella who feel compelled to ascribe it control over narrative and subjective agency. This is a diaspora performance of possession, much like Garvey’s transhistorical, diasporic charisma and Bessie Smith’s in the first chapter. This magical realism, as Shalini Puri helpfully elucidates regarding Brodber’s earlier possessed fiction, Myal, is both representative of colonialist “objectification” and an act of “subjectification” in its insistence on connections to silenced, working-class pasts and transnational futures through the means of modernity (1993, 101). This double meaning of the potential of the tape recorder in the postmodern marvelous realism of Louisiana parallels with what Michael Taussig calls “the magic of the state” (1997, 25), or the charismatic power of the national imaginary and culture to “possess” the people into a national political body, a magic that will return in chapter 5 around Pauline Melville’s work. The recognition of these powerful narratives, however, or the means used to convey them, are not easy in Louisiana’s world—partially because of the uneasy place of diaspora literacy across local and national boundaries, such as Jamaican Anancy stories.28 Ella

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narrates the difficulty she has figuring out the “lesson” of diaspora after Madam Marie tells a story about a magic pot that loses its power if washed: “What magic thing did we know? The recording machine. Of course. Was she saying something about it?” (Brodber [1994] 1997, 79). The “we” is unclear at first—she may be referring to Madam’s “West Indian friends” or to herself and Reuben, her European-born, Africandescended, “black” husband. Which begs the question: who is the audience for Ella’s own possession? To what use is Ella, or are “we,” the diasporic community, supposed to put the charismatic force of modernity? Returning to the machine she had “scoured and rinsed so well” (79), Ella discovers “new” material and an even larger ascription of agency elsewhere: Let me take this leap in the dark knowing that I would not dash my foot against a stone nor be locked in that dreadful, awful, confounding basement. This was what the story of the magic pot was about. Let me accept this recording machine as the magic pot. Let me suspend my own sense of right behaviour and not worry about keeping around me what is not mine. (80) Rather than confronting modernity as outside of or threatening to diasporic and indigenous culture, Brodber narrates it as a window into a different kind of diasporic possession, one not locked in by the “singular experience” of the Middle Passage. The self as individual gives over to the concept of diaspora, accepts charismatic force as subjective possibility despite and instead of the risks of repeating, reporting, or “cleaning” the past. Narratively, this repetition is out of a singular narrator’s control for the politically better and the hegemonic worse. Brodber’s insistence is not on an ignored past but, on the contrary, on a “dirty” one, one not cleansed or exorcized of its diasporic traumas, even as it is not wholly dominated by their residue. It is not, in other words, the only story to tell about black experience. Instead, Louisiana focuses resolutely on the extraordinariness of the ordinary—the quotidian practices of working-class black women that undergird not just local constructions of community but diaspora’s charismatic possessors. In fact, Brodber seems to suggest that black women need to harness charisma, not just copy the masculinist narratives of Pan-African intellectual discourse. Linking black folk and oral cultures to the significance given to print culture in the West is certainly not a new strategy, but it is given refreshed diasporic and imaginary life in Brodber’s complex narrative. In the age of modernity, diaspora can maintain transnational

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connection and visibility, enough to possess a material body of people into a type of community, but that connection is fleeting, and not exactly “feminist” in the mainstream use of that politics. At what cost, Brodber asks, can women access this transnational imaginary, and how might that look or, more importantly to Brodber’s project, archive differently than someone like Frederick Douglass or C. L. R. James?29 Ella/Louisiana’s local celebrity status, as well as the narrative’s resolute belief in the possibility and necessity of print culture, holds some cues as to Brodber’s mode of feminist and diaspora citizenship and discourse. Modernity and the black public sphere can be executed, and documented, like Jackie Kay’s displacement of early-century African American blues to midcentury Scotland and beyond, on an acutely local scale to find it surprisingly full of diaspora connection. New Orleans itself is not a surprising site of diasporic activity,30 but it sits as neither the race capital Harlem nor a retreat to primitivist folk stereotypes of the rural South. If anything, Brodber’s recentering of New Orleans in diasporic exchange signals a call to (re)possess our own critical discourse surrounding the First to Second World War time period in black cultural production from the tight grip of not just Harlem but Harlem’s version(s) of black modernity and its links to diaspora subjectivity (as do Hurston’s text and Kay’s).31 New Orleans is American and French, urban and southern, colonial and postcolonial, a port city and a site of slavery, cosmopolitan and provincial all at once—as is the signifier of black women in Louisiana’s modernity. The tape recorder takes on a significance in Louisiana that it cannot in Chicago, Ella’s initial fieldwork station, where it is too attached to official narratives of academic and state discipline—not to mention the critical weight of the great migration. Its uses, like the valence that Garvey takes on in preserved black pubic records, fluctuate, like those of black modernity. Lament or celebrate are not and cannot be the only options for feminism or the black diaspora—instead, Louisiana presents acceptance of the complicated and often fallible ways such modernities enact themselves in black women’s experience of diaspora. The “magic” of diaspora is embodied in the tape recorder’s ability to function through modernity’s boundaries—national borders, technologies of life and death, class levels and literacies, geographic and ideological identifications. Less a “prophecy” than a prophet, technology delivers the message to a willing—or less so—audience (Hoenisch 2005, 99). It is on this point that Louisiana is most insistent—the difficulty of the act of reading diaspora itself, rather than finding it already intact. Once

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Ella gives up her excessive protection of the machine, her intimidation by the state apparatus, literally, she has to acknowledge her own facility; “the most challenging part was hauling a recording machine” ([1994] 1997, 47) gives way to scenes not just of acceptance but of trying on different and intimate relationships to modernity and to the archive: “It was this process that finally led me to opening the recording machine gently and reverently as if I was cleaning my baby daughter’s private region” (50), Ella asserts, or “Having moved it, I began to feel like a lover pulling his love to him and asking why” (50). Ella’s embodied approach suggests not just the fragility of diaspora connection but a desperate need for a more contingent, relational approach to achieving and assuming diaspora agency. No literary or ethnographic midwife, Ella finds herself unable to bear children or even sustain her own material body in the face of modernity’s challenge in the main plot of the text—the indelible cost of charismatic possession. Rather than do the inviting read of the archive-as-surrogate here, I would like to point to Brodber’s construction of the unnaturalness of reproducing blackness and black community. Diaspora is debilitating work—not just for Ella, who becomes dangerously possessed in her method, but for the narrative itself, which strains and flexes under its multiple frames. If Brodber’s plotting suggests the ability and desire to experience diaspora outside of the confines of modernity’s discourses (for Ella, at least—not for Reuben), her structure denies any such easy escape; Louisiana is framed through black print culture, disinvested in the naturalization of geography, origin, or reproduction and deeply engaged in the capital flows and intersections that modernity affords. For Hurston, there is no way out of modernity’s rhetorical or material power—only the critical inhabiting of the excessive charismatic possession of state power. For Louisiana, there is always the possibility of hybridity, the composite force of diasporic modernities that carries on as a medium, not an end. Brodber’s asymmetry of form, at a base level, then finds itself more at home in postmodern criticism than does Hurston’s text, with Louisiana’s self-conscious, textual innovation and fictional interdisciplinarity. If Hurston predates the critical structure that could intentionally inform her genre moves, Brodber’s intentional novelistic experiments investigate the metacritical issue of how it is we produce and consume knowledge about blackness and the black diaspora in particular. As stated before, Brodber begins the novel with a “prologue” from a fictional black women’s press located in Chicago in 1978. Both a sparse roadmap and

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a post–Civil Rights revision of the verifying letter that fronted so many nineteenth-century black autobiographical texts, this “editor’s note” textually enacts the asymmetrical difficulties of contextualizing black women’s writing in broader national-cultural terms, from the New Deal to the golden age of anthropology to the burgeoning business of black publishing. It also poses, as the “Louisiana: A Novel” on the title page suggests, a formal question to the contemporary fiction reader: how do you recast pre–Civil Rights discourse on gender and the Black Atlantic without the employment of postmodern pastiche, on the one hand, or strict social historical realism, on the other? With the faux-historical prologue’s call to “join us” in “the community of the production,” Louisiana maps out an asymmetrical possession by the political movements of multiple fronts in the history of twentieth-century diaspora organizing ([1994] 1997, 5). In doing so, the novel suggests that black women’s writing, and black women as subjects, engage in political, intellectual, and cultural discourses of diaspora differently than many accounts of PanAfrican organizing might privilege. The difference, for Brodber, is produced in and reflected by the asymmetrical practices of reading diaspora “into the community of the production” and the production evident in the postmodern seams of her novel. Like the phantom frame of white patronage and white audience expectations of primitivist narrative that haunt Tell My Horse and its criticism, Louisiana’s narrative is already contained—and critiqued— through its fictional frame of black print culture (the aforementioned prologue), with its political agenda of Pan-African connection, or “the study of commonalities in African America and the African Caribbean in the period between the World Wars” ([1994] 1997, 5). The novel’s version of the Caribbean-US journey is decidedly multidimensional, focusing on sameness and continuity as well as ruptures, the irreducible difference of location, class, or capital that so frequently define travelogues or other modernist-primitive tropes.32 Louisiana’s difference from many contemporary visions of black women’s connection across diaspora is a subtly embedded frame: Garvey. As a sign of institutional infrastructure, the Garvey connection jump-starts the fictional events and supports what little sense of linear narrative there is in the text. But it also deemphasizes more commonly represented contemporary narratives of how to write the “silences” of black women’s participation in diaspora. Though the novel engages the plot points of magical realism, it always maintains the standpoint of social realism and Enlightenment principles of observation and verification. The connections between women, and

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between geographic and temporal locations, may be psycho-spiritual, but they are always rendered recognizable and familiar modern political structures, such as the ideology and organization of Garvey or the practice of anthropology. Ella’s medium abilities are represented, in fact, as a leg of fieldwork, complete with a tape recorder and her “filecards”: “My head is a cardboard box of US and West Indian file cards, each beginning ‘name, date of birth, place of birth’” ([1994] 1997, 129). It is here, in the last section of Ella’s story, that we find Brodber’s revision of black feminist historiographies of silence. Black women as diasporic subjects are always already anthropologists for Brodber, with the archive and fieldwork itself coming from the sustained practices of unexpected and local connections. They are the possessors, rather than just embodiments, of the broader desire for diasporic connection. These historicisms are not the ancient cultural connections to a monolithic archive or some “primitive matriarchy” to offset Hurston’s “rooster’s nest” of masculine postcolonial modernity (Rado 1997, 296–97); they are not just cultural, either, as in the song that gives the last section of the novel its title and initiates Ella into her psychic power, “Ah who seh Sammy dead.” This is not a search for origin, or a claim to it, as much as the source is beside the point for Louisiana’s diaspora feminist reading practice. Method, instead, is Brodber’s focus, in the sense that diasporic literacy is more equally accessed through the magic/metaphor of charismatic possession. Louisiana suggests that black women’s writing (including academic writing on race and gender, I would argue) can be, and is, a medium—a conduit for diaspora knowledge that does not merely repeat well-worn paths. This methodology does not demand total difference but, like Hurston (perhaps even more so), proximity. To look at Garvey through his organization, for instance, is to identify the diaspora not just though cultural travel but through the experience of locally bound, working-class, black women. While certainly serving as a critique of existing superstructural diaspora studies practices that privilege the written and modern visions of masculine modernity, Brodber’s novel does not imagine a feminist practice that counters but rather complements—and makes use of—these modern tools. Hurston’s form finds black modernity somewhat irreconcilable with feminist politics and subjectivity. Brodber’s novel suggests, from its postfeminist and postcolonial frame, a mode of reading and experiencing feminist diaspora within the existing structures—including black print culture, public political movements, marriage, and academia. Obviously, sustained contact with these spheres is uneven at best,

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but each offers helpful models of discursive practices of documenting, understanding, and producing diaspora for Louisiana’s hybrid feminist politics. In fact, in giving structural authority over to a print culture seeking to commodify diaspora connection, Brodber suggests a similar impulse as Jackie Kay to resist denials of black objectness. In finding productive meaning in possession, both Hurston and Brodber are able to “register both difference and sameness,” a poetics of relational reception that does not necessarily mean a totalizing turn away from the reified black subject (Battersby 1998, 142), just as the previous chapters have explored popular and iconic representations of blackness under new aesthetic and political frames. Brodber’s focus, then, rests not on the tools of black modernity themselves but on their asymmetrical use and abuse—and hence, not on black women’s silences but on their locally literate labor: “I had done my duty I was saying, and she nodded mentally. My job was to help him re-live his painful past. He had to take it from there” ([1994] 1997, 105). Like the passages in which Ella-as-narrator attempts to negotiate her engagement with other, surprising (for her), more traditionally “feminine” identities, from supportive housewife to chef to spiritual “horse,” the work of diaspora is unglamorous in the practice of everyday life, even for a celebrity medium such as Madam Marie (likely based on Haitian “psychic” Marie Leveau from the early nineteenth century) or Louisiana. But given a fictional “I” here, it is the narrative, like Tell My Horse’s, that threatens to seduce the reader into received readings of feminist subjectivity or of return to a diaspora source. And the surface narrative self-consciously engages in the route of black femininity escaping from the supposedly false lures of the modern, especially the sexual and gendered “independence” that often counts as a black woman’s burden. But again, it is a frame that fails to draw the reader into a cohesive fantasy of diaspora belonging; Brodber insists on interrupting any singular flow for more than a few pages, shifting narrators, time periods, speakers, and settings abruptly and without a clear map for the reader to easily follow. And while the payoff of the Garvey connection could be seen as a recapitulation to standard narratives of black masculine charismatic presence in the archive, Louisiana’s confusing method of sustaining or delivering a familiar reward refuses that easy identification. Possession, like building the colonial and imperial archive, is hard work—and for Brodber, necessarily feminist work in its centering of gender as a method of reading the documents and the field of black modernity.

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The difficulty of reproducing the text—rendered at every level of plot in the novel and again in its complex structure—offers another complication to the genealogies of black women’s representation in chapter 2. In choosing (or being chosen) to do the work of spiritual possession, filled with ruptures and discontinuity, the narrative remains childless (as many of the texts in Difficult Diasporas do as they work around mimetic realism in their representation of women). Louisiana has Ella’s character introduce this noncondition multiple times throughout the text without lament, substituting curiosity and practicality as dominant modes of understanding the power of (in)fertility and (re)production.33 But in refusing a naturalized connection to psychic skill, where not bloodlines but intellectually rigorous routes lead to diasporic connection, Brodber subtly creates a route that is not founded in the lost material of racial connection to Africa but instead in the active labor of possession. This possession itself is a metaphor or alternate mode of research and fieldwork. Power is within the woman researcher’s desire but, more importantly for Brodber, in contact with and participation in community. This community is asymmetrically constructed, however. Not based on nuclear family or generations of a bloodline or a coming-of-age fantasy, the community of Louisiana is mongrel, motley and shifting from Americans and West Indians, women and men, sailors and prophets and jazz musicians alike. And, following Miranda Joseph (2002), it is contingent and temporary in its structural alliances. That this community is founded in New Orleans by a previously “Westernized” African American–identified agent of the state seems, though, to retread the hierarchal asymmetries of the colonial and postcolonial narratives of transformative contact with the Other. And indeed, Louisiana takes this narrative cliché seriously, interrogating what Stephan Greenblatt would call the productive “wonder” of contact as well as in Ella’s “return” to Harlem, to a more recognizable black modernity and to the debilitating gaze of the colonizer (Greenblatt 1991, 20). Extending the sequence to a return, Ella is faced with becoming the “native show” to an old white family friend/lawyer (D. Taylor 2003, 64): “The lawyer’s first glance at me told a tale. I was something the cat had deposited on the mat. A chewed up rat. It had never struck me, nor did it Reuben, that to enter this part of America I would have to discard garments I had been wearing for years and find myself a more passable costume” ([1994] 1997, 133). Had the narrative rested on this moment of incomprehension, the returned gaze of the anthropologist to the modern world, rather than the primitive, it would still be an extension and reversal of the primitivist

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narrative, but the passage continues: “The people with me in the train hadn’t minded my outfit. Nor did those on the other side of Mr. Lukas’ office door there in Harlem. Of course we were all black and therefore odd to begin with, so what did a dress a little bit more loose and a little longer than the others matter” (133). Here, in experiencing the return to the capital of black modernity (like Kay’s Smith), is one of the few times that Brodber has her protagonist fall in line with an easy continuity of blackness in the diaspora. Like Garvey’s UNIA members, she locates connection not in the usual readings of charismatic possession and power but in the everyday rhythms of proximity and difference that diaspora entails. The collapsing of difference, so easily asserted in Reuben’s narrative in the novel, is more difficult to come by for Ella’s story, as she cannot “read” black culture—music, dance, and so on—as her, and hence the “race’s,” possession so easily. Instead, she merges the Western researcher’s “thoroughness” with the conceptual migration of possession as practice and as metaphor. Before she can assert a collective blackness, she needs to be “governed not simply by script but also by productive conditions that render their entire play a tripling” (H. Baker [1987] 1999, 53). The song “Ah who say” that signifies diaspora connection must be repeated and experienced not once, not twice, but multiple times, in venues as varied as Madam Marie’s parlor, Mammy’s funeral, on the tape recorder, and in a memory of Jamaica, before the narrative can collapse black difference: “After ten or so years with this clientele I know the songs and where we each learnt them. No need for argument. The songs are equally ours now. We just sing. I made no statement on this. It is the shape of things” (Brodber [1994] 1997, 129).34 This “shape of things,” while still romanticized, has been denaturalized—made into a collective “after 10 years,” without great fanfare or public “statement” (Brodber [1994] 1997, 129). As Tabish Khair suggests in his comment about the difficult timing of the postcolonial, Brodber sees possibilities for the black diaspora outside of linear or political versions of history (2002, 123). The structure of the novel itself employs this model, with its strategic withholding of signposts and relevant narrative information—a prolonged diaspora literacy reflected in the fictional frame of nineteen-seventies black publishing or even nineteen-thirties anthropology (Saunders 2001, 151). Diaspora is there, though black modernity needs to catch up to its surprising trajectories, creating a conventional narrative arrived at though unconventional form. In this sense, Louisiana and its strategy of asymmetrical magical realism could be seen as endemic to existing Caribbean literature, a

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“tradition of Caribbean writing that claims a future which neither imitates Europe nor longs for Africa, but draws its energies instead from the historically syncretic reality of the Caribbean” (Puri 1999, 105). Brodber’s method, rather than just privileging local, oral, or vernacular sources, aligns practices of racial and gendered literacy with this “syncretic reality.” Rather than a threat from colonial imaginaries that “can strike from a great distance,” literacy is a form of local and global possession that makes strange familiar community ties and is able to recognize and perform the difficulty of diaspora and feminist discourse without othering or collapsing that very estrangement (Kortenaar 1999, 70–71). Louisiana’s asymmetry is again not essentialized but always already “mediated” and, in fact, edited—not just by Ella but by Reuben and then again by the press in the fictional frame. The attempt to order the “social memory” of spirit possession creates a “problem” of what Brodber would call “logic”—one she addresses as movement between the abstract of language and literary form to the material realm of social interaction: “from simile into metaphor and from metaphor into assumptions addressing real behavior” (Roberts 2006, 20). This requires, as Puri and my asymmetrical reading of Louisiana suggest, an investment in discursive alterity in the form of the indivisible remainders of narrative form that linger in Louisiana’s texts. For all of the “returns” posted, and for all that Ella cannot reread the West Indies into Harlem and New Orleans and beyond, we are still left with an epilogue attributed to the husband/editor that asserts the “thought/promise” that “the coon can,” the organizing stamp that the black press endorses and edits to cap off the fictional narrative ([1994] 1997, 166). Brodber’s received difficulty in locating a coherent voice for Ella, pre– or post–Civil Rights, suggests that like Vodou and anthropology in Hurston, black modernity claims the rare combination of “theoretical egalitarianism” and “an indelible propensity toward hierarchy, inequality and authoritarianism in practice” (Burton 1997, 254). Brodber’s format exposes asymmetry at the level of cultural and linguistic literacy and, in that process, the myths of disciplinary mastery. One of the most poetically rendered monologues in the novel, one that attempts to materialize metaphor perhaps more obviously than any other passage, comes at the moment of Ella’s self-transformation and acceptance from disciplinary subject into interdisciplinary methodology: My husband had ordered a pendant for our fifth wedding anniversary. We really needed to mark our change. It was delayed. Here it is on my birthday. Things have been happening to me and of course

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to us ever since Mammy’s death five years ago. That fellow, Metamorphosis had been constantly with me. With the arrival of Louise his activity peaked. My pendant celebrates that peaking. Stand if you will. Let your arms hang loose in front of you. Now put the tips of your index fingers and the tips of your thumbs together. Your extremities now form a diamond. Imagine the diamond to be solid, three dimensional. Now pierce a hole through the centre of this. That hole, that passage is me. I am the link between the shores washed by the Caribbean sea, a hold, yet I am what joins your left hand to your right. I join the world of the living and the world of the spirits. I join the past with the present. In me Louise and Sue Ann are joined. Say Suzie Anna as Louise calls Mammy. Do you hear Louisiana there? Now say Lowly as Mammy calls Louise and follow that with Anna as Louise sometimes calls Mammy. LowlyAnna. There’s Louisiana again, particularly if you are lisp-tongued as you could well be. Or you could be Spanish and speak of those two venerable sisters as Louise y Anna. I was called in Louisiana, a state in the USA. Sue Ann lived in St. Mary, Louisiana, and Louise in St. Mary, Louisiana, Jamaica. Ben is from there too. I am Louisiana. I wear a solid pendant with a hole through its centre. I look through this hole and I can see things. Still I am Mrs. Ella Kohl, married to a half-caste Congolese reared in Antwerp by a fairy godfather. I wear long loose fitting white dresses in summer and long black robes over them in winter. I am Louisiana. I give people their history. I serve God and the venerable sisters. ([1994] 1997, 124–25) Tripled and doubled, solid and “hole,” delayed and “could be,” Louisiana is narrative innovation rendered as realism, the imaginative leap required in order to reinterpret the global/local logics of diaspora.35 That Ella’s body must eventually die for its interdisciplinary, multimedia passions is what Alice Walker, in her influential essay on Hurston, characterizes as a “comical lunacy” through which she hopes “greater disciplines are born” (1984, 116). Ella’s’ fictional body, as material form, must conform to its narrative hybridity in becoming such an inter-“disciplined” body (Darroch 2003, 91). At the end of Hurston’s “drama” section of “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” an essay that embodies the asymmetrical politics of transition in its non sequiturs as well as its unexplained and/or absent transitions, Hurston introduces us to a narrative anecdote, one of a public

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drama of a black vernacular heterosexuality. Comparing “a robust young Negro chap” to Louis XIV, Hurston does a play-by-play translation of his body—posture, gesture, costume—into language ([1934] 2000, 34). And it is not just any language but an aggrandized and primitivized register that turns him into “male, giver of life” (34). Recognizing and reproducing the colonizer’s script, she understates, “There is no mistaking his meaning.” The “girl” in the drama gets more action, less language: “Her whole body panging and posting, . . . that is all of a dare. A hip undulation below the waist that is a sheaf of promises tied with conscious power” (34). A dare, a promise, power—these high concepts emerge directly from her “action,” the exaggerated inverse of the amount of language it took to turn the black male body into a “king” of the modern street. The drama of gender and race, the public nature of how black bodies are read in the colonized world, and how black speech possesses the bulk of political power in the black public sphere are not incidental tensions for Hurston. Indeed, she ends, “These little plays by strolling players, are acted out daily in a dozen streets in a thousand cities, and no one ever mistakes the meaning” ([1934] 2000, 34). Received ways of reading blackness are dangerous, for Hurston and for Brodber, in their effort to maintain fixed subject positions and cultural methods. The repetition of “no one ever mistakes the meaning” betrays an anxiety around the performance of blackness, particularly concerning gender and sexuality, an anxiety of never being able to escape comparisons to categories of modernity that read blackness as permanently possessed by the primitive. It is a trap that Hurston both participates in and exposes as such in her poetics of asymmetry, as she ends “Characteristics” saying, “Nothing less than a volume would be adequate” to document the fullness and particularities of black expressive culture, particularly vernacular language (44). From “no mistaking” to “nothing less,” her sequencing is her signal of conscious disciplinary failure, her lack of wholly “ethnographic” intentions in her work, her engagement of the values of modernity as well as her commitment to alternate ways of reading for it and through it. Rather than thinking Hurston as betraying her own disciplinary anxieties, as other critical material has focused in on, I read Tell My Horse as exposing modernity as an entanglement of both fear and desire that the text employs for its narrative and structural conflicts. Entanglement here is a site, as it is for Glissant, but also a temporality—an ongoing, tense duration of proximity between differing ideological and material positions. Brodber picks up this timing as a continuity with the postmodern era and with a vision of the New World as the locus of modernity,

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defined through syncretism and hybridity (Hall 2003, 234). Hurston performs Haiti as the point of origin for modernity only to expose its messy fictions of race, gender, and political and social “progress,” historically and ideologically. Brodber locates Jamaica as one point of reference in a wide and surprising web of consciously constructed connections and intersections. Modernity comes possessed not just by its past but by its diasporic present, trying to hold on to all of the “old” narrative strains of self- and empire-building in new forms. Modernity, in turn, possesses the present for Hurston’s and Brodber’s texts and arrests it into a perpetual failure. Achille Mbembe might locate this seeming stasis as what he calls a mutual “zombification” of colonizer and colonized (2001, 139), but for Tell My Horse and Louisiana, there is much possibility in the “convivial” relationship between the two (Gilroy 2004). The shared public cultural practices and gendered spaces of both texts are where the potential for radical political thought emerges, asymmetrical as those borders may be. Foregrounding gendered critiques of charismatic power, Hurston and Brodber repossess modernity to make a more difficult diaspora visible, rather than searching for its conceptual cure, through interdisciplinary prose formats. The “dynamic suggestion” of metaphorical and rhetorical movement, no matter how indelicate the juxtaposition, prepares the field for “the abrupt and unexpected changes” that characterize black modernity. This modernity pivots on the public, disciplinary, and difficult dramas critical to understanding the complexities of race in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. The following chapter interrogates that terrain in the later half of the twentieth century as it is mapped out through the subject of “Third World Women” and postcolonial investments in their narrative representation. This extends the work of Brodber’s and Hurston’s fictions to consider short fictional form as a critical response to the call for and to representational orders of gender, race, and location.

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Intimate Migrations: Narrating “Third World Women” in the Short Fiction of Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and Pauline Melville

Third-world women, on the other hand, never rise above the debilitating generality of their “object” status. —chandra mohanty, “Under Western Eyes”

Erna Brodber, in an essay ruminating on the stakes of realism in literature and beyond in the Caribbean, tells a brief anecdote of Alexander Bedward, a Jamaican man in the early twentieth century who purportedly tried to fly in emulation of biblical narratives of ascension. Her punchline (of the essay and the anecdote) echoes her genre-bending novel Louisiana’s insistence on the untranslatable, commidifiable nature of knowledge production and bleeds through to this chapter on postcolonial short fiction and the impossible task of representing “Third World Women” in the diaspora: “Magical realism gone too real, if this story is true” (2002, 23). No generic or epistemological play will keep you pure from the West (with its own brand of the marvelous), nor will it keep you safe from the expectations of social realism placed on peoples of the African diaspora both by Western institutions and by those of us attempting to correct their corrupt legacy. The previous chapter interrogated the discipline of anthropology as a study of race through the innovative, feminist ethnographic forms of Brodber and Zora Neale Hurston. But with the call for more and different stories, especially from women, coming from and through transnational feminist discourse, how might we consider the work of narrative and narrative representation in forwarding a heterogeneous feminist concept of diaspora? Does narrative and narrative culture have a place in this important work, and can it offer something different from social science interrogations of the material migrations of people—something close to but not quite the same as “realist” knowledge production about Third World Women?

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Late in the series of vignettes in South African writer Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost In Cape Town, the first-person narrator defends the act of writing, claiming, “But they’re only stories. Made up. Everyone knows it’s not real, not the truth” ([1987] 2011, 172). Wicomb calls our attention to the drama not (just) between the author and the audience in diaspora literature but between narration and the act of reading (and subsequently, interpretation), much as Hurston and Brodber do in their recombinant forms. But if Hurston and Brodber largely reckon with the absence of women from discourses of diasporic modernity, especially in the first half of the twentieth century, another set of writers such as Wicomb write through the difficult sign of the “Third World Woman” as a constant mark of tension between that which is marked as tradition (women and African diaspora societal roles for them) and that which is marked as modernity (Western feminist ideals of freedom and individualism). Wicomb’s riff on Black Atlantic women’s fiction as just that— fictional stories that assume skeptical readers—calls out this tension as a false binary, asking, Who is the “everyone” reading and interpreting these texts—transnational feminist and African diaspora studies critics? “Subaltern” subjects? “Third World Women,” a construction I self-consciously employ throughout this chapter? The imagined Western reader? Wicomb’s challenge to this grouping challenges how we come to “know” or to recognize these fictions of “Women,” intimately enough to dismiss or defend them. This currency of Third World Women’s representation does not have to overwhelm interpretation of narrative form for African diaspora women writers such as Wicomb, Bessie Head, and Pauline Melville, as well as the critical body of work surrounding their fictions. Difficult Diasporas has thus far tried to take seriously what literary and cultural production can bring to the table next to the discourses of biography, natural sciences, history, and anthropology, to name a few of the fields that have a hold on knowledge production around the signs of women of and in the Black Atlantic. As the title of this chapter suggests, I read Head’s, Wicomb’s, and Melville’s work in intimate proximity with the term and the debates around “Third World Women”; instead of insisting creative fictions into the category of representative reality, this chapter asks what work they might do, otherwise, for our thinking around entrenched categories of identity, location, and the constitution of progressive academic practice around the subject and sign of African diaspora women. As Florence Stratton argued in 1994, for too long the figures of the Prostitute and the Mother have frozen canonical representations of African women and

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feminist readings of women in the African diaspora as suffering victims (Stratton 1994, 123; Nfah-Abbenyi 1997, 11). The short fiction of these three postcolonial authors reorders the sequence of representation of African diaspora women through mobile narrative techniques, migrating our attentions away from the novel and social realist models of relation. All three seek, in the form of the short story collection, alternatives to both national politics and “protest writing” as points of intervention in the representation of Third World Women. Head mixes a flat narrative affect with allegorical tales that border on magical realism to undo representative expectations and turn them back on both the reader and on reified concepts of “the local” as a somehow politically safe space for transnational feminist or nationalist work. Wicomb fragments and then refracts the experience of both the national/local and diaspora for Third World Women’s bildungsroman in her crisp narrative frame, focusing in on detail so sharply that it leaves deep fragments and ruptures in any chronological line of home and return. Pauline Melville literally writes through and as the transnational, splicing recognizable instances of the politics of globalization (Big Oil, deposed dictators) into eccentric renderings of daily and domestic detail that challenge the boundaries of gender in the postcolonial world. Their “hits” of the real, their visible breaks in the form of the short story collection, force interpretive work that extends beyond mimetic representation of “Women” and into questions of how gender, sexuality, and geography enact myriad syncretic narrations of diaspora. The short fiction collections of Head, Wicomb, and Melville disrupt the domestication of aesthetics in African diaspora women’s writing. Through their renegotiation of the realist plots offered up as representations of Third World Women, these collections question the utopic dream of affiliation as the solution for a progressive postcolonial future, instead offering a feminist practice of reading in, across, and through the difficulty of difference without collapsing the uneven stories diaspora can tell into a generically gendered political and cultural economy. Engaging narrative fiction at its core, and with its core contradictions, Difficult Diasporas calls on diaspora itself for its contradictory set of desires for community and mobility, both of the “migratory subjectivities” available to black women, as Carole Boyce Davies (1994) has laid out, and the way that black women writers expose and expand gender as a system of oppressive “realism” that overdetermines narratives of postcolonial modernity. Neil Lazarus, laying out his hope for affiliation as the most progressive methodology for both representation within

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and readings of postcolonial literature, reminds us of how much representation is embedded in narrative in The Postcolonial Unconscious’s chapter on the subject (2011); Lazarus’s optimism for the future of the field is explicitly opposed to incommensurability, which he aligns with an antihumanism that performs a “refusal to represent” in literary technique. But the teleology he imagines, the definitive call for the promise of future compatibility, seems bound to fictional representations that look like what we already know—humans, animals, intimacies between discrete objects and beings. In this chapter, I imagine the form of the collection as another way of reading and representing the relationship between incommensurability and affiliation, one bound to the tensions of representing Third World Women. In terms of form, realism imagines a “correspond[ence] in some direct way to the ordinary world of day to day life” (S. Baker 1993, 82). In this chapter, I read collections of short fiction as sets of innovative relations between form and content that are a matter of scale—a play between proximity and movement and hence intimate migrations of what Chandra Mohanty (1984) diagnosed as a set of reading practices around women in the developing world from Western feminist scholarship (and, we could add now, the rhetoric of international aid and NGOs). Mohanty’s formidable diagnosis of Western homogenization of Third World Women in knowledge production spreads to questions of representation in and readings of African diaspora women’s literature. A grave example of the subaltern that Gayatri Spivak (1993) argues cannot “speak” through either history or literature, “real” African diaspora women—poor, rural, illiterate, tradition-bound victims—are fictive representational embodiments of the bind that Spivak details in her essay, an argument not finally for refusing to represent but for being attendant to the impossibility of finding a reasonable way out of the bind. As this negotiation suggests, there is of course great debate and great slippage concerning the place of women in African diaspora women’s writing. At once intimately a part of quotidian routine and conceptually central to the discourse of diaspora identities, gender is also a mode of critique perhaps too easily aligned with the representation of the socially “real.” South African writers Bessie Head and Zoë Wicomb and British Guyanese author Pauline Melville negotiate this ideological ambivalence with their eyes toward a revision of realism, using strategies that reimagine the relationship between gender and narrative form as a particularly transnational feminist concern. In “Snapshots of a Wedding” in The Collector of Treasures (1977), the title story of the collection You

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Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), and “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival” in The Migration of Ghosts (1999), Head, Wicomb, and Melville map gender in its local, cultural boundaries as well as through contact with national and diasporic systems of education, law, and marriage. The tensions and effects of such connections are evident not only in the events of the texts but in their aesthetic construction as well—narrating gender in conflict with the fames of their stories as well as within the borders of their short fiction collections. These subtle shifts in narrative technique expose and enact the simultaneous distance and proximity of gender in defining a diasporic imaginary, including our own academic labor to (re)produce a responsible “real,” much as the earlier Wicomb reference to “stories” (staged between mother and daughter in the text) makes the question of migratory textual readings one of both distance and proximity; “everyone knows” the fiction even though, undeniably, “the real” is engaged for its own recognizable properties to elicit response—an engagement and a critique, simultaneously, of strategic essentialism. The short fiction collections of three authors from three key historical moments and locations of debate around the object of “Third World Women” provide a unique format and structure not just for representing difference and heterogeneity in mimetic literary representations of women—the “good” or better kind of Third World representation that Mohanty rightly calls for—but also as a way of calling attention to the sequencing of these orders of good and better objects of study. Like feminist studies today, the “strategic generic instability” of the short fiction collection (Griem 2011, 389) lies in its contradictory reception as both a “didactic,” transparent genre, according to Wicomb (2010, 216), and also one that can both perform and explore the heterogeneous failures of narrative identities—racial, national, familial—in its counter to the novel. These collections’ accumulation of representations of women, then, is not beside the point but made as a critique of overarching narratives of how representation should be, how it should sequence itself to get out of Spivak’s bind. To say there is no way out is not, for the collections, to say there are no possibilities, just as to celebrate difference and diversity within existing narratives of doing justice to representation cannot easily lay claim to achieving the impossible task of “accurately” reading and thinking about Third World Women. The short story collection, as a genre a that is not quite the novel and not just a single story, offers the lure of both forms in reading diaspora Third World Women as a sign: coherence and fragmentation (J. Kennedy 1995, vii; Dunn and Morris 1995, 2; Griem 2011, 392–93). Head, Wicomb,

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and Melville play with this tension in both direct and indirect ways, constantly undermining our assumptions and connections between the stories in their texts. These collections, with their prose reorderings of central fictions of Third World Women’s subjectivity, expose the intimacy between the anger of seeing power’s starkest abuses and the anguish of recognizing that every production of knowledge around those acts may and will, asymmetrically, fall into an order we cannot control or recognize. These short fictions recognize the limits not just of theory but of practice around representation and they perform those limits as failures in conversation and in proximity with one another—intimacies that produce the unknowable, unpredictable world beyond our current, belated visions of representation as social justice and our versions of the critical and creative narratives that might sustain it.1 That intimacy is deeply imbricated with narrative and its breakdown is, perhaps, not as evident. Lauren Berlant argues that “intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way” that “poses a question of scale that links the instability of individual lives to the trajectories of the collective” (1998, 281, 283). The texts in this chapter align this desire for connection as a descriptive rather than a prescriptive one, and it is that narrative desire itself, and its failure, that they take as their “object” and their practice of representing Third World Women. Head, Wicomb, and Melville ground themselves in the terms of intimacy—as a quotidian aesthetic of narrative that cannot promise singular solutions or reparative rationality (ibid., 5–6)—to represent the eclectic connections that characterize diaspora and its cultural, political, historical, and social investments. The thick mix of “proximity” and “privacy” intimated in the term intimacy resists but also complements the hypervisibility of representations of racial and gendered violence that characterize much of our scholarship and knowledge production around the black diaspora (Lowe 2006, 192–93). In fact, all three texts and authors do much to destabilize easy notions of race or racial community in Africa, the Caribbean, or the postcolonial metropole through the exposure of intranational racial fissures and the ambivalence of mixed-race subjectivity within racialized calls for community.2 This call to relationality speaks through transnational feminist scholarship, too, be it in the colonial context of “intimate, reciprocal, and contradictory relations” (McClintock 1995, 5) or the more utopic call for a feminist practice that figures “a different order of relationship among people” (Alexander and Mohanty 1997, xxviii). Hence, I pay particular attention in

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these collections to revisions of romance plots in the realist mode, those self-conscious moments of domestically located narration that, pace Susan Andrade’s argument about the micropolitical worlds of African women novelists, map into the national and diasporic flows of political and cultural capital.3 The three collections studied here largely represent, of course, thwarted and/or deeply compromised romance plots—realist rather than fantastic in their deep economic and social contextualizations in the narratives. The turn to the transnational and the turn to diaspora each reflect these affective modes of migratory relationality, as when Yogita Goyal (2010a) argues that the narratives of diaspora itself assert relation and perform erasure at the same time (in terms of Africa, in her argument)— a structure of feeling that Michelle Stephens ascribes to a “diasporic, affective sense of belonging, longing for both integration and mobility within the world-system” (2005, 16) and that Miranda Joseph argues is the “dialectic of complicity and resistance” that constitutes any community’s relationship to the modern global state (2002, xxv). There are aesthetic and generic dimensions to this complex community formation as well, so that “the style by which” affiliations “are imagined,” as Stuart Hall frames it (2003, 244), “produced the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” in Benedict Anderson’s formulation of practices of hailing and belonging ([1983] 1991, 25). That “style,” or genre of representing community, has overwhelmingly been imagined in postcolonial studies as narrative, especially in the form of the novel. While the next chapter will imagine how nonnarrative strategies might displace these ordered communities of identity for diaspora feminism, this chapter imagines that we can perhaps read this narrative genre differently through the neglected form of the short story collection. This is to say that aesthetics and genre matter for feminist strategies of representing the ambivalence of modern diaspora experience. Realism itself retains the history of doing justice to the “everyday reality” of “lower class life” in post-Enlightenment fiction (Brennan 1990, 52) and the Eurocentric, middle-class values associated with such narratives of “social problems.” Representing the quotidian of the so-called masses presents obvious problems for postcolonial adoptions of the form, critiques of which have, as critic Laura Moss succinctly puts it, “ranged from viewing it as form that interpellates the ideology of imperialism, to characterizing it as naïve or simplistic, to configuring it as an attempt at the representation of a single authenticated experience” (2000, 1). Susan

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Andrade diagnoses this as a conflation in nineteen-nineties postcolonial criticism, notably that of Anthony Appiah, of realism with nationalism in the literary realm (2009, 184–85). Clearly, my project in this book shares with Appiah and others this reading. But this perception of realism has perhaps created a postmodernist aesthetic favoritism in postcolonial critics that Andrade and Moss charge with “looking for an apparently radical form to hold disruptive content” (Moss 2000, 1), yoking postmodernist aesthetics to postcolonial theory in, yet again, a much-debated way.4 But as Andrade and Moss lament “the plague of normality” (Moss 2000) that dogs realism in postcolonial studies, there is, of course, a movement to rethink realism’s “re-visionary potential” (from Wilson Harris 1999, 176) as a strategy of both “representation and subversion” (Moss 2000) that leads in various critical formations to national critique (Andrade 2009), resistance (Moss 2000), transgression (Maufort 2003), and even political utopias (Bahri 2003). These “disruptive” moments in and of realist fiction are, for theorist Michel de Certeau, not antinarrative but rather narrative’s very function—as the “coup,” or the break or “hit,” of the real. He outlines narration in The Practice of Everyday Life as a “tactic” of resistance in which “it is no longer a question of approaching a ‘reality’ . . . as closely as possible and making the text acceptable through the ‘real’ that it exhibits” (1984, 79). Perhaps this is most apparent in the quick hit of a venue outside of the novel itself: the short story. As Jackie Kay recently said in an interview (Rustin 2012), the potential portability of short fiction is oddly matched with its potential to sustain an intensity—a mobile identification that a reader might “carry” with her after the “quick hit.” The practice of making stories occupies de Certeau’s version of realist aesthetics, whereas feminism has taken this critique a step further, as my earlier reading of Wicomb’s “stories” line suggests, interrogating de Certeau’s “hit” in terms of reading “women” and the “real” relationally—as a methodology, in other words.5 To borrow from Elin Diamond’s reading of realism, “In the ubiquitous feminist critiques of representation in the 1980s, it became clear . . . that feminism was also a kind of realism, seduced by the desire to represent the truth about social reality, but was constantly in the process of questioning that position,” so that the desire to represent inevitably involved the desire to critique (1997, xiii). Instead, Diamond posits realism as a “theater of knowledge” that “produces the malady it is supposed to contain and cure” (ibid.). The critiques of ways of reading “the world, the word, and the text,” as Deepika Bahri (2004,

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200) calls it, are the central issues emerging out of a postcolonial and feminist critique of representation as never in directly equivalent correspondence to any real thing or object. Transnational feminist narratives such as Head’s, Melville’s, and Wicomb’s are nonetheless attendant to the “dangerous” desire to read narrative realism as such—as ever failing to “contain and cure” systems of interpretation that particularly mark African diaspora women’s writing and subjectivity. The shock of recognition found in reading the unruly bodies of Third World Women and their narrative representations in fictional worlds— worlds “everybody knows” are not real and yet stand in for the sociological real all too frequently—announces itself in the line just preceding “Snapshots of a Wedding” in Bessie Head’s 1977 short story collection The Collector of Treasures, from the story “The Wind and the Boy”: “And thus progress, development, and a pre-occupation with status and livingstandards first announced themselves to the village. It looked like being an ugly story with many decapitated bodies on the main road” ([1977] 1992, 75). Head, a South African–born writer in exile in Botswana until her early death in 1986, keenly observes the desire to narrativize the real, and the narration of the real, as a practice of hailing readers, “announcing” to them its explicit project and hence undoing, in a way, the veneer of organic, inevitable narrative plotting. The “ugly story” coming into being in Collector gives way to the opening frame of “Snapshots of a Wedding,” its title alone suggesting the fraught nexus of malady and cure that forms transnational feminist engagement. “A Wedding” portends the general from the specifics—the “Snapshots”—of any ritual viewed in an African village, promising the sociology of details that Mohanty’s critique of Third World Women decries. Head starts out self-reflexively engaging the modes of sociology, of imagined village collectivity, as she begins many of the stories in The Collector of Treasures: Wedding days always started at the haunting, magical hour of early dawn when there was only a pale crack of light on the horizon. For those who were awake, it took the earth hours to adjust to daylight. The cool and damp of the night slowly arose in shimmering waves like water and even the forms of the people who bestirred themselves at this unearthly hour were distorted in the haze; they appeared to be dancers in slow motion, with fluid, watery forms. In the dim light, four men, the relatives of the bridegroom, Kegoletile,

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slowly herded an ox before them toward the yare of MmaKhudu, where the bride, Neo, lived. People were already astir in MmaKhudu’s yard, yet for a while they all came and peered closely at the distorted fluid forms that approached, to ascertain if it were indeed relatives of the bridegroom. Then the ox, who was a rather stupid fellow and unaware of his sudden and impending end as meat for the wedding feast, bellowed casually his early morning yawn. At this, the beautiful ululating of the women rose and swelled over the air like water bubbling rapidly and melodiously over the stones of a clear, sparkling stream. In between ululating all the while, the women began to weave about the yard in the wedding dance; now and then they bent over and shook their buttocks in the air. As they handed over the ox, one of the bridegrooms’ relatives joked: “This is going to be a modern wedding.” ([1977] 1992, 76) Head’s opening invokes a particularly gendered representation attributed to African and African diaspora literature, one engaged in narratives of the natural, the supernatural, romance, representativeness—and of course, with the last quoted line, its undoing. Picaresque and realist at the same time, this opening has Head confronting head-on the particular link made between the real, representation, and African women writers, supposedly documenting “the soap-opera-like drama of village life” (Stec 2003, 125). The last bastion of the quotidian, gendered representations of domesticity and intimacy rarely receive critique attendant to formal strategy, as the mark of this gendered narrative often displaces the critical need for formalist interventions, under the sign of “Third World Women.” Head, hailing us to read her in such a monolithic narrative form, shifts from florid narration into what she herself characterized as a “cool stance”—the distance of narration as critique of the reception of African women’s writing as real and authenticating the “local” world of ritual in women’s private spheres and its potential for subversive structure in its global critique (MacKenzie 1999, 13). Collector instead presents a knowing simultaneity of binary representation, such as “modern” and “traditional,” as evidenced in the opening of “Snapshots of a Wedding.”6 With Head’s “cool stance” comes an imagined transnational feminist nightmare of a plot: the groom has been seeing two women: one educated, “modern,” and hence haughty; the other uneducated, village bound, and hence kind and patient. Impregnating both women around the same time frame, Kegoletile chooses the modern, capitalistically promising match of Neo, despite his periodic refusal to leave the “yard”

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or his emotional attachment to his village lover, Mathata (who, of course, makes no claim on him). The vain new woman of (neo)colonialism is further called out by her family, as the only literate woman within it, as one aunt undermines her confidence in her social-sexual position outright until and through the marriage ritual, when the short narrative abruptly ends with the aunt’s public exclamation, “Be a good wife! Be a good wife!” ([1977] 1992, 80). This follows immediately after another picaresque paragraph of narration, a circular structure of representative expectations and critique. Such a formalist sense of humor, usually buried in critiques of Head’s novels under (understandable) analyses of madness and tragedy, is instructive across the collection.7 What Françoise Lionnet terms “dissymmetrical sexual arrangements” (1993, 149) are laid bare here between not just women and men but tradition and modernity, colonial urbanization and the rural village, Western literacy and social-historical memory, and generations of gendered practices, through structure and sequence. Head’s “cool stance” refuses didactic positioning in its very representation of didactic narration. Narrative is instead employed as the aesthetics of a “compulsory domesticity,” or a compulsory postcolonial heterosexuality with a complex structure of evident but also more unconscious rules of diaspora relations that form the nexus of reading African diaspora women’s texts—including patriarchal tribalism, cultural nationalism, colonial and neocolonial ideologies, structures, and technologies, and the irrationality and inevitability of their function in the “real” of postcolonial logic and law (Davies 1994, 48; Stratton 1994, 159). The desire for social-sexual conformity in this abrasive narrative end belies the lack of exclamation, the very flatness of Head’s description of the complicated logic of association which infuses the intimate migrations—the “daily soap operas”—of her narrative. The exposed irrationality of these social relations through the interpolation and utterance of supposedly unconscious law (“Be a good wife!”) is a “hit” to the reader in its mimetic exaggeration of “the reigning power of instrumental rationality in the modern world” (Bahri 2003, 124) surrounding gender and explanations of gendered power. Head’s fiction acts as a world opposed to and held up against the world “everybody knows” how to read for Third World Women’s representation. “Be a good wife!” then exposes the structure that must construct and discipline that presentation of Third World Women and their constant reproduction. “Good Wife” itself is the translation of the Hindi word sati, the practice of “widow suicide” that Spivak unpacks in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1993, 103). This coincidence emerges as instructive in the trap

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of representation and debates that leave feminist and diaspora practice immobile, unable to escape narrative binds. Spivak herself articulates a preference for the “anguish” she articulates as opposed to the faux-rational arguments of insufficiency as methods of critique (1999, 196). Head finds her way through this anguish in narration itself, exposing the labor of maintaining the tradition-versus-modernity bind for women writers. In taking on the intimacy of gender, Head establishes her stake in a quotidian diaspora (like Hurston)—or rather, diaspora as a phenomenon defined through quotidian shifts, categorized by Kenneth Harrow as “change,” or “the threshold where change takes place” that concerns much of her short fiction (1993a, 169). But it is not the anthropological pull of the local “real” that Head represents; it is the politics of gender in diaspora relations—how the flow of the heterosexual marriage market intersects with, manages, moves, and solidifies global capital flows. The aunt’s anxiety at her niece’s place in that flow, despite her advantageous position as educated and working at a bank, betrays the narrative investment in the wedding ritual itself, the significance attached to marriage market value and heterosexual validation that translates into postcolonial “success,” a gendered hybrid of ideals of culture, community, and modernity. That Head lets the seam show in this feminist morality tale gone awry is not to say that the “local” narrative is better or more morally sound than its transnationalized counterpart. Instead, Head’s ending begs us to read the fable-esque qualities of the story as imbricated narratives, in which each woman, the male point of the triangle, and the reader are manipulated by the local and the global, and to see that those relations are always, intimately, and importantly, gendered. In this vein, Head writes in an uncomfortable realism, making explicit the implicit relations of power that construct Third World Women, particularly the gendered and sexualized economics that make up the everyday use of globalization and modernity, as it is critiqued in the previous chapter. In this, Head performs not a transparent authenticity of the village but a complex version of Rob Nixon’s “rural transnationalism” (1996, 243) whereby it is made clear that the “problem” is not in finding a better Third World Woman subject but in diagnosing the inflexible scripts of national and community inclusion themselves (Counihan 2011, 68). Head narrates the inaugural decades of postcolonialism in terms of global flows if not nationalist ones, as sites that construct new modes of Third World Women’s representation. Head’s narration lays bare the underpinnings of transnationalism as the economics of heterosexuality and reproduction. Authority, in a typically diasporic fashion, is diffuse and

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taken on by those who are under its thumb or on its periphery. Rather than the drama of male-female relations, which the story seems to perform, Head’s narrative strategy shifts its realism to expose and critique the essential role of heteronormativity in constructing and regulating the local and the global. In doing so, she brings a transnational feminist focus on location to theoretical formulations of diaspora studies itself, gendering globalization at its root rather than as metaphor, extension, or resistant periphery. In thinking about the narrative strategy of the entire collection of The Collector of Treasures, it becomes even clearer that gender and sexuality are at the core of Head’s definition of the black diaspora and of her critique of its systemic feminist failures. As Craig MacKenzie’s sensitive reading of the form of Head’s collection (neglected in the face of her more postmodern novel experiments) suggests, she employs the “mode” of the collection with both respect for the oral form of storytelling and a critical distance that is rendered aesthetically in order to critique gendered modes of “belonging” in African culture (1989, 140). Head starts the collection with another fablist narrative, “The Deep River: A Story of Ancient Tribal Migration,” a story of a community unhinged by its investment in the romantic entanglements between their deceased chief’s son and heir and his father’s third wife. Staged as a conflict between the perceived security offered by unquestioned social norms and the “individuality” produced by violations of gender and sexual customs, both by the actors in the drama and by its witnesses, the narration of “The Deep River” betrays itself not just as a surprisingly ambivalent narrative about the choice between the local and more migrational change but as a commentary on origin tales and their roots in gender and sexual dissonance: In the meanwhile the people quietly split into two camps. The one camp said: “If he loves her, let him keep her. We all know Rankwana. She is a lovely person, deserving to be the wife of a chief.” The other camp said: “He must be mad. A man who is influenced by a woman is no ruler. He is like one who listens to the advice of a child. This story is really bad.” ([1977] 1992, 3) Besides the again comic way Head flatly narrates the “rules” of gender and power, this narrative exchange also draws a through line with the end line of a later story, “The Wind and the Boy,” setting up a collection

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that coheres through its constant exposure of “stories”—the fictions that govern social engagement and even the material reality of quotidian life (rather than the other way around). Head’s opening tale stages not just the significance of the everyday to the construction of these stories but how gender and sexuality are and can be made foundational to the way we think about and read for “migration”—of peoples and of ideologies. Head herself acknowledges this in her only footnote of the collection, which fascinatingly reads, footnote: The story is an entirely romanticized and fictionalized version of the history of the Botalaote tribe. Some historical data was given to me by the old men of the tribe, but it was unreliable as their memories had tended to fail them. A reconstruction was made therefore in my own imagination; I am also partly indebted to the London Missionary Society’s “Livingstone Tswana Readers,” Padiso III, school textbook, for those graphic paragraphs on the harvest thanksgiving ceremony which appear in the story. B. Head ([1977] 1992, 6) From oral history to colonial textbooks to sheer imagination, Head makes transparent the tools not just of realist fiction but also of history’s construction itself. In doing so, she sets the stage for a sequence of stories related only through their focus on strange relations—the difficult intimacies between community and individual, between local and global, between reason and romance, between rural and urban sites, and between the periphery and center that hinge on how gender and sexuality are read. Like Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, Head’s stories often include an almost Greek-chorus-like beginning and end, a turn that signals responsibility and/or deep conflict around the narrative plot’s imposed moral choices. Imposing the will of custom and law is never easy or simple in Head’s narration, even if the story’s initial moves seem to flatly present that picture. Much as in “Snapshots,” Head often undoes the central narration. In “Life,” for instance, Head constructs a story of a prostitute who has come to a rural town from Johannesburg, and the neighbors who enjoy but eventually resent her flouting of social convention: But they too were subject to the respectable order of village life. Many men passed through their lives but they were all for a time steady boyfriends. The usual arrangement was: “Mother, you help me and I’ll help you.” ([1977] 1992, 39)

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This taboo-breaking behavior confronts the affective temporality of village life: “It created people whose sympathetic and emotional responses were always fully awakened, and it rewarded them by richly filling in a void that was one big, gaping yawn. When the hysteria and cheap rowdiness were taken away, Life fell into the yawn” (43). Gender, sexuality, and location, for Head, create local systems, local realisms, that do not easily or evenly match up with their “diaspora” counterparts. Head’s narrative continues with ending paragraphs moving rapidly through legal, business, and social reactions to Life’s murder at the hands of her husband, a successful business cattle man of the village. (Mis)reading the individual for the community, the judge, who was a white man, and therefore not involved in Tswana custom and its debates, was as much impressed by Lesego’s manner as all the village men had been. “This is a crime of passion,” he said sympathetically. “So there are extenuating circumstances. But it is still a serious crime to take a human life so I sentence you to five years imprisonment . . .” (46) Head drops this without adding more, letting the ellipsis stand in for the strange alliances between cross-racial masculinities, between the colonial legal system and neocolonial cultural relativism that assumes radical difference and between colonial and postcolonial systems of power and authority.8 These differences collapse in relation to gender and sexual management—they collapse, that is, in the face of African women’s sexuality and the commonplace need for both its violent regulation and its invisibility, the contradiction of what I earlier in the chapter termed compulsory postcolonial heterosexuality at the state and systemic level as well as in relation to the subject. Barely hanging on to the “human” loss, it is a diaspora circulation that (re)infuses the story with the peripheral possibilities of narrating African women structurally: “A song by Jim Rivers was very popular at that time: That’s What Happens When Two Worlds Collide. When they were drunk, the beer-brewing women used to sing it and start weeping. Maybe they had the last word on the whole affair” (46). Contingent (“maybe”), intimate, and yet spurred by the global and local migrations of public affect and loss, Head’s narration offers a transnational feminist politics that cannot be fixed to either a subject or a set of coherently “African” affiliations. From the story of the desperation “ritual” murder of two girls prone to performing the marital squabbles of everyday difficulty (“Looking for a Rain God”) to the collection’s title story, “The Collector of Treasures,”

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which stages the graphic spectacle of husband-murder through the terms of the quotidian and optimistic significance of platonic social relations, Head’s collection acts as an aggregate of expected stories of Africa, those that plotwise veer toward tragedy.9 But these “bad” stories are always undercut by a narrative strategy that not only includes a metanarrative on the power of how we tell these stories as a way to undo their repetitive use devaluation but is also undercut by the small eruptive moments that counter and resist easy readings of the “same” story, most of them narrative styles of aside, extraplot. These reproductions recenter the dominant neocolonial narrative and its recessive shadow of the rural with Head’s excess of stories that happen simultaneously. And like the exclamatory surprise ending of “Snapshots of a Wedding,” the collection narrates the fallacies of gender and choice, transnationally and in terms of “good stories” of representative narrative (the local valorized over the global, etc.). From Head’s perspective in exile from her native South Africa in Botswana, one could invoke again the “cool stance” of narrative personae, not in its objective realism or lack of affect but in its aesthetic trafficking in the peripheral, in a narrative voice that catches the strains of typical readerly assumptions and, with a flat about-face of narration, undoes them via exposure of the gendered structures of feeling that uphold them. Head’s collection is not that of a stranger but also not of one who easily embraces investments in community or individual solutions to the “problems” of diaspora or transnational feminism.10 Each is critiqued from the inside, including fissures, failures, and impossibilities in linking diaspora subjects to one another, even on local ground, in individual stories disrupted by the difficult narrative dissonance in the collection itself. Head offers us the renegotiation of patriarchal postcolonial logic and its complexities through the “cool” medium of the collection. South African author Zoë Wicomb takes on the challenge of representing Third World Women by enacting first-person fiction in her 1987 short story cycle You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. Wicomb is herself a critic of the overdetermined readings of African literature, referencing Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s assertion that “the structure of the black text has been repressed and treated as if it were transparent” (Gates 1984, 6; cited in Wicomb 1990, 42). Wicomb, like Head, engages a structure that at first glance seems to be a clear play of such transparency. Each story is written in the firstperson perspective of a central character, Frieda Shenton, in a comingof-age chronology. But within the stories, and between their gaps, we

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can read a critique of reductive interpretation, as well as representation. Head employs the didacticism of a “cool stance” to represent and expose postcolonial logic and its various reproductive fronts, whereas Wicomb draws us to what de Certeau identifies as the crucial reordering, the “surprise of the detail,” where “something in narration escapes the order that it is sufficient or necessary to know” (1998, 79). Saikat Majumdar, in her development of Naomi Schor’s argument about “the detail” in fiction, argues that such an emphasis on quotidian minutia constitutes “both an index of the domination and a sensitive feminist critique of the grand narratives of its resistance” (2005, 59). As Dorothy Driver and Julika Griem have also pointed out, Wicomb’s strategic use of the short story collection allows a multivantaged viewpoint that complicates the stark structure of apartheid and the registers of racial and cultural difference that exist beyond its national boundaries (Driver 2011). Though Driver particularly locates this extranational context as the property of Wicomb’s later collection, The One That Got Away, we might link this complicated interplay of “politics and aesthetics” through Wicomb’s narrative style itself in Cape Town, with its ambivalent endings to stories that seem to deny not just traumatic resolution but full acknowledgment of the plot that has also been so flatly rendered, as various critics note, in the prose before it (Griem 2011, 395; Viola 1989). Instead of plot, Wicomb focuses on the textures of these versions of Third World Women, insisting on a radical specificity of detail that equals not exceptionalism or accuracy but its ambivalent counter—the very banality of the “tragedy” that often gets elevated to exclusive identity scripts in discourse around gender and postcolonialism. Bringing us back to the call of the universal epistemology of fictional experience (“everybody knows it’s not real”), Wicomb’s title story follows Frieda as she takes a public bus to meet her white boyfriend for an abortion during the last decade of apartheid. Wicomb has the narrator self-consciously struggle to bring her narration deeper into realism, as an “anchor” for the practical, if illegal, act looming—and the one already consummated—using two older women on the bus as her focal point in a mock reproduction of the realist trope of “observing” the “lower classes” in the quotidian (de Certeau 1998, 67). By narrating the effort to attach fiction to this narrow model through her first-person narrative, Wicomb exceeds and critiques its limits. Take this long exchange, starting with a rumination on the birth-control pills taken by the betrothed daughter of one of the women’s employers:

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“Ooh, you must see her blush over the pictures of the wedding gowns, so pure and innocent she think I can’t read the packet. ‘Get me my headache pills out of that drawer Tiena,’ she say sometimes when I take her cup of cocoa at night. But she play her cards right with Master George; she have to ’cause who’d have what another man has pushed to the side of his plate. A bay leaf and a bone!” and moved by the alliteration the image materialises in her hand. “Like this bone,” and she waves it under the nose of the other who starts. I wonder whether with guilt, fear or a debilitating desire for more chicken. “This bone,” she repeats grimly, “picked bare and only wanted by a dog.” Her friend recovers and deliberately misunderstands, “Or like yesterday’s bean soup, but we women mos know that food put aside and left to stand till tomorrow always has a better flavour. Men don’t know that hey. They should get down to some cooking and find out a thing or two.” But the other is not deterred. “A bone,” she insists, waving her visual aid, “a bone.” It is true that her bone is a matt grey that betrays no trace of the meat of fat that only a minute ago adhered to it. Master George’s bone would certainly look nothing like that when he pushes it aside. With his fork he would coax off the fibres ready to fall from the bone. Then he would turn over the whole, deftly, using a knife, and frown at the sinewy meat clinging to the joint before pushing it aside towards the discarded bits of skin. This bone, it is true, will not tempt anyone. A dog might want to bury it only for a silly game of hide and seek. ([1987] 2011, 70–71) The detail—which is where de Certeau locates the act and the art of narration—of the bone is at once material, a visual aid, an obvious metaphor, an object of (narrative) desire or lack thereof, an astounding sign for the economy of cultural literacies on display from the literal to the abstract, and an extended meditation on narrative authority and resistance in black women’s writing. Narrating the real is an act of interpretation, not only bound to time and space—as in noting what “only a minute ago adhered to it”—but also its narrative migration to other imaginative conflicts and exchanges: between women, between places, between genders, between classes, between races, between dogs, and in fact, between narrative forms. The literary game of hide and seek is one that Wicomb couches in the narration of (aborted) reproduction—the undesirable narrative

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impulses, the refusal of the charge to reproduce, as well as to manage and organize yet more Third World Women for diasporic consumption and (mis)interpretation. Yet Wicomb constructs a narrator who also cannot help herself, sequencing the quoted passage as an exchange of migratory narrative impulses, not just to tell stories but to read them differently, even when made of the same definitive material—the bare bones, or details, of Third World Women’s representational forms. In this, my reading questions Constance Richards’s (2005) argument about the text, which asserts the latent revolutionary (in the Fanonian sense) narrative that informs the social exchanges in each individual story. While this nationalist narrative hovers around the text, I argue that Wicomb’s realism, with its narrative passivity in the face of political action, questions the value of such action on the level of gender, culture, and cultural production. Wicomb, in the time of apartheid’s early crumbling, writes back against the romantic possibilities of diasporic relocation or of local community. Instead, she creates a flat narration and narrator who does not so much refuse to represent as she refuses to narrate representation as Third World Women are tracked to do, as “victims” of both history and tradition. Passive narration refuses resistance and trauma as the affective modes of women’s narrative style.11 While one internal bus narrator is stuck on her stylistically rendered metaphor, the other imagines a narrative turn to revalue the frame story about women’s sexuality. All of this is couched in the first-person narrative of flatness that Wicomb offers us in Frieda’s “I,” struggling to refuse all but the most surface interiority even as she performs the role of narrator. Critic Sope Maithufi argues that Wicomb’s storytelling hence presents narration as an act of “depersonalization,” a sort of passive refusal/ disenchantment with identity scripts (2010, 75). A case could be made that this is Wicomb’s own self-reflexive comment on the literary and narrative voice—Frieda the budding writer self-consciously rendering realism without the “self,” and constantly failing. Like in the sequence in the quotation, the omni- and interruptive presence of materiality— be it “bone” or the fetal “fluttering” the narration keeps returning to— emphasizes not an irreducible real but the constant contingencies that stand as both the inspiration and obstacles to the “stories” one might narrate about class, race, or sexuality within the rubric of the Third World Woman. Semipublic, the conversation and the narrator’s body both tell of the presence of disciplining racial power and its simultaneous and constant failures to fully regulate the unruly strains of narrativity that spring from

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it. But it is not just the structures of everyday contact that this comment on narrative and materiality extend toward—it is, of course, the legal structures of apartheid law that governed the spatial relations, and hence the proximity and intimacy of contact, between the four racial categories of apartheid (Bantu/Black, White, Coloured, and, later, Asian).12 In 1950 with the Mixed Marriage Prohibition Act and in 1957 with the Amendment to the Immorality Act, both “official” and unofficial romantic and sexual relationships between whites and nonwhites were, legally, criminalized. Under this regime, this central story in Wicomb’s collection (set prerepeal in the mideighties) speaks to the material consequences and peripheral realisms of these laws—the legal excess of literally criminalized intimacies. The literary game of hide and seek—of allowing the overarching legal “real” into the story’s narrative construction—is one that Wicomb couches in the evocative terms of aborted reproduction. This style, then, exposes the fantastic proposed migration of law and religion as systemic attempts—and failures—to regulate the cultural production of gender, sexuality, and sociality. Like the birth-control pills disguised as medicine or the pilfered chicken legs, the women’s exchange is rife with the vagaries of “morality,” state and imposed social relations. This occurs again and again in the story, be it through asides from Frieda’s narration or when the white woman performing this abortion asks and then dismisses Frieda’s potential unwhite status under the guise of white, if not (hetero)sexual, respectability and linguistic practice—her nurse winking, like the page, at us all the while. Reality becomes a trick of language, the narrative suggests, coding Frieda’s “white,” educated mode of speaking as a presentation of the self that helps to displace history and context. This long passage on the bus, supplemental to the plot itself even as characters literally, if not assuredly, progress in space, lays out the contradictory narrative form and desire of the text. Wicomb’s more overtly postmodern postcolonial narrative, David’s Story, as Shane Graham says, “employs (post)modernist narrative techniques in order to dramatize the ways in which history itself has been ruptured in Southern Africa,” as well as “calls into question the adequacy of narrative alone to enable healing and the restoration of agency” (2008, 129). You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town also emphasizes fractures and fissures in reality, albeit on a more local scale. But it is just that localism, deceptive in its first person, that the collection employs as a complement, critique, and expansion of how we might think, straightforwardly, about “women’s” stories from Africa, beyond protest realism and the politics of constant

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crisis (Morton 2010). As a novella, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town skips large chunks of formative time—notably, the time spent outside of Cape Town and the Western Cape, as well as the colonial metropole, London. These lapses between “stories” are never fully narrated, only briefly referenced. In doing so, Wicomb clearly chooses to displace the colonial “center,” committing herself, as in the quoted passage, to the peripheries and asides that add up to or are left as the remainders of representation.13 It is not that her project is to illuminate silences or to make the invisible visible, as much as it is to bring the acuity and absurdity of the quotidian palimpsests of narration into the frame of the “terrible stories” that dominate the appetite for African diaspora women’s fiction, performing what critic Christa Baiada refers to a “feminist critique and revision” in her narrative at the same time (on David’s Story; 2008, 33). For the reader, the consumption of this realism is difficult to digest in its multiplicity, its unexplained, ambivalent gaps that undermine any sociological takeaway as “representative” stories about South Africa or even coloured South Africans. At the end of the story, with the expelled fetus standing in for the bone, we are left, like the narrator, wondering who would want this legacy or the responsibility for telling its ugly story again and again—an ambivalence about writing as an African woman at all that is exhibited, again, in the description of narrative desire (via the bone) as good for only a “silly game of hide and seek.” That the details Wicomb chooses are corporeal material—a chicken bone, an expelled fetus—is not, of course, coincidental. In the same way that she leaves out Frieda’s education in Europe in order not to reproduce the same stories of diaspora, migration, and return, the materiality of the narrative details also refuses reproduction, instead occupying the territory of waste, excess, or returning to Deborah Richards, the ectopic. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town engages in the partial encounters, the throwaway contact that is at once repetitive and unremarkable in the global frame. In this title story itself, we get the flip story of Head’s compulsory postcolonial heterosexuality—its refusal, afforded by race, class, and location in the plot but also in the fragmented narration that refuses community or diaspora progress narratives of freedom in Michael’s offer to relocate to Europe and marry. In other stories in the collection, we find the same aborted sense of time and distance from corporeal experience or communal continuity: waiting for a train that is late to take the narrator to her first day of private school, an essay she cannot finish in time, an odd night with old friends in Cape Town, waiting for a doctor who never arrives and instead having a not entirely welcome sexual

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encounter with someone from her youth. This belatedness carries the collection—not a sense of learning what the narrator will do but what in a sense has already, or has not already, happened. This is the passive narrative temporality of what is beside the point, the aftermath, the future, the yet-to-be.14 Even with a first-person narrative, we are held at a distance from plot, from the lure and the romance of interiority, an easy-toread narrative subjectivity of Third World Women. For Wicomb, this is a refusal: intimacy without the stability or fixity of narrative progress—a stagnant subject, in the experience of reading, one who thwarts fantasies of agency or victimhood. In choosing the title and central story of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, I have chosen possibly the most domestic of the stories, plotwise. But like the seemingly insignificant domesticity of “Snapshots of a Wedding” that on closer reading is undercut by the transnationalism of class, education, and capital dispersal, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town deals in understandings of microdiasporas, the various worlds that racial and gendered categories migrate into and between. That these stories about gender, sexuality, and racial hierarchy are told in the narrative space of local transit (itself divided among four racial categories in the classification system under apartheid) is not a coincidence to Wicomb’s aesthetic project, her halting and deeply specific narration; that narration is at once decisive—clear on “all the bone is good for” and obsessive on the mechanics of when and how to pay the fare—and disorienting, jumping from one radical specificity to another: the bone, the fare, the fluttering, the flashback romance narratives. These detailed “hits” traffic in the uneven temporalities of the transnational, with apartheid rendering a modern colonialism that is anachronistic and yet, like the educated coloured narrator, very much a product of modernity. This paradox is all the more salient in its reliance on locality—even as all of the stories center on Cape Town and the Western Cape province, “community” is a strange, alienating experience, even among family. As Sue Marais argues about the collection, As a form positioned somewhere between the coherence of the novel proper and the disconnectedness of the “mere” collection of autonomous short stories, the short fiction cycle evinces a dualism which renders it particularly well suited to the representation of that tension between centripetal and centrifugal or entropic impulse which obtains in any society. It is a form especially apposite to the South African context, where the conflict between

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community, solidarity and national unity, on the one hand, and dissociation, segregation and “apartheid” on the other, is notorious. (1995, 29) Wicomb’s narration is at once embodied and distant, exhibiting interiority even as it finds contact—between women, between genders, between races—difficult verging on the impossible. Its narrative form of deep specificity and the ultimate “detail” is at once unique and totally out of context, out of macronarrative view. The entire collection exhibits a version of Head’s “cool stance,” albeit with a much different vantage—perhaps what a recent Safundi special issue on Wicomb would call a cool or “suspended” cosmopolitanism (Gurnah 2011, 275). Head’s realism converges in the interruptive frame of the community—the beer-brewing women, the “bad story” that intimates a collective subjectivity that is at once at odds with and sympathetic to individual difference. For Wicomb, in the relations between gender, representation, and narration, there is no collective. There is only the radical particularity of time, space, and social relationality that puts both the collection’s subjects and the reader at a critical distance from representational affect and the experience of narrative in the diaspora, even within the “density of social context” represented (ibid., 263). Even local geography, like migrating racial categories, is caught in transit, trapped in perspectival contingency—who will determine its meaning and how it will be determined is socially constructed, yes, but in deeply different and difficult narrative choices. This ambivalent specificity defines Wicomb’s theory of diaspora and of reading diaspora: threatening to collapse not just by the cumulative weight of haunting colonial pasts and nationalist presents but in the face of the sheer number of ways to narrate that diffuse an all-encompassing context. Her narration of gender is complicated, contradictory, impulsive—held so close that it cannot rest easy with its contrary narrative desires. Wicomb understands this as a necessary politics of the diaspora rather than a politics of representation longing for connection and affiliation. You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town narrates its deep ambivalence about all representation; it invests itself in the ubiquitousness of storytelling, at the micro and literary level, a perhaps necessary “silly game” that adds up not to collective truth but to the deeply contingent strategies of reading and writing “the world, the word, and the text” that are shaped by the national and transnational histories that surround their production. For both Head and Wicomb, narrative is a means of highlighting how

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unstable these stories are and so how active and critical our interpretive strategies must be in engaging diaspora representations of Third World Women. While Head’s collection marginally trades in mythic renditions of magical realism in the context of “the village,” and Wicomb’s narrative gaps and unreliable admissions (notably the death of Frieda Shenton’s mother, who later in the collection is not dead at all) test the boundaries of narrative coherence, Pauline Melville’s work out of a Caribbean/Latin American context more squarely takes on the problem of the “real” as a metaphysical as well as narrative question in the era of globalization. If limited previous studies have paid little attention to the formal and stylistic elements of Wicomb’s and Head’s short fictions of gender in Africa, the opposite is true of Pauline Melville’s oeuvre. Of the growing body of scholarship on Melville, much of it takes on the question of magical or marvelous realism as the crux of her literary postcolonial critique, with less attention paid to “Women” as a prominent category of analysis.15 Magical realism, also discussed briefly in the previous chapter on Erna Brodber, is a form of fiction that transnational and postcolonial studies has come to expect and understand as a mode of exposing the uneven power dynamics of colonial rule and its wake. As a way to explain the unconscionable abuse of power beyond the imagination and the diffuse and surprising ways that colonized discourse infiltrates daily life in the colony and postcolony, magical and marvelous realism are mostly read as narrative devices of postcolonial resistance, as well as tactics well suited to New World contexts of hybridity. But as Brodber warns, this perspective depends on reading, not just authorship. As Alejo Carpentier articulates, marvelous realism is a “privileged” vantage point, not in terms of class but in terms of its “widening of the scales and categories of reality” (1995, 76). Critics such as John McLeod (2009) lay out Melville’s specific uses of “ghosts” in particular, as, first, the representative specters of the past which unevenly haunt the (independent) present. Extending this diagnosis to the postin postcolonial and postmodernism, McLeod crucially links political critique and aesthetics to the belatedness that shadows both the critical and literary fields. But he also outlines another temporal field of inquiry, that of “business unbegun,” or marvelous realism occupied by the expansive specters of narratives unallowed by (post)colonial contexts, futures that could never be rendered in Pauline Melville’s humorous, sharp, and eclectic collection of stories The Migration of Ghosts.16

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While McLeod’s critique runs toward the potential of these strange unghosts in terms of fictive subjects, plots, and represented places, I would like to suggest a mode of reading the stylistic ticks of the marvelous postcolonial narration of The Migration of Ghosts as a series of failures and ongoing interruptive openings, of the likes of Head’s “cool stance” of undoing end lines or Wicomb’s brutally ambivalent gaps and refusals of predictable narrative affect. For Melville, a British Guyanese novelist, screenwriter, and actress with ties to Latin American, Caribbean, indigenous, American, and African ancestry, the insertion of the “marvelous” into her New World realism is both crucial and peripheral to the strange temporalities of diaspora modernity.17 The vagaries of representing race, gender, and location create uneven marvels, some of which are picked up by the narrative but many of which are not. In this sense, Melville’s collection reproduces the repetitive loops of transnational histories of the Americas and the black diaspora’s seemingly limitless supply of loopholes—exceptions and excesses that tenaciously exist within and beyond the tragic narrativity of the Middle Passage and the literal experience of travel as freedom that Gilroy’s ship-aschronotope points toward.18 The persistence of such remainders that do not get picked up on our usual critical radars pushes transnational feminist and diaspora critical inquiry into what this book considers recognition of our perpetual yet generative crisis—both mourning the lost representations that uneven power structures of race, gender, and location never “let” happen and recognizing that those unrealized and unimagined times, places, and subjects are the stories we create out of that dislocated desire to renegotiate discourse around Third World Women. What McLeod diagnoses as “business unbegun” is, in fact, our very business, or the business we are in, as diaspora and feminist critics. It is this temporality, Melville and this chapter suggest, that we have in common, critically, and that Wilson Harris and Elizabeth DeLoughrey see in the “quantum imagination” that merges the real and the unreal, myth and science, in Melville’s collection’s “open door” to ideas of constant change (DeLoughrey 2007a, Harris 1996).19 In Difficult Diaspora’s effort to imagine Africa as part of the syncretic, modern diaspora world, putting the previous texts in proximity to Melville’s exuberant use of the realist genre can, I hope, bring out the affiliations between them. The use of subversive narrative tactics for Head and for Wicomb respond to the demands of social realism in representing Africa and African women in particular, but also to their preapartheid frames. Melville’s turn-of-the-millennium text speaks to

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her historical context in the New World, one that she locates in multiple sites of the diaspora in the collection. Head and especially Wicomb lay out hyperlocal realisms that still find connection to a global frame. Melville strays further in her settings and her style but still sets about finding new, bawdy routes for gendered subjectivity in the diaspora. Away from the intricate plotting of her complex novels, Melville’s short fiction frequently finds her in a casual mode, depicting postcolonial leisure time of travel, carnival, and even retirement. Melville’s refiguration of fellow British Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris’s recurring character, Da Silva (1977), a London painter with a vivid imagination and various “cultivated,” rather than naturalized, connections to the New World, emphasizes just this strain of mixed and creative genealogical narrative and the two writers’ deep cross-generational respect for each other’s insistence on imagining social, cultural, and historical relations beyond social realism. What and where Melville takes off from there is in its own time zone, so to speak. The Migration of Ghosts spans history, continents, and even species to suggest new regimes of diaspora “ghost” stories, those of a future that reckons with and is reckoned with by a past less in terms of epic success or failure and more in the ordinary affective regimes of humor, surprise, wonder, boredom, frustration, and indifference. Like Wicomb’s refusal to represent via expected narrative routes, Melville’s narratives traffic the boundedness to narratives of identity within migratory contexts. As with Melville’s previous work, the local and indigenous are not reified categories but flexible ones that are also contingent, for better or for worse, on historical change. More than a static subject that is acted on, though, Melville’s notion of the local is also one that dynamically acts on colonialism and globalization, the contact often rendered transformative in the same quotidian ways I have tracked narrative affects earlier in this chapter, in Head’s villages or on Wicomb’s bus. She does this through a narrative strategy that “mixes a realist, mimetic, presentational code with an imaginative and fantastic one,” one that can imagine alternative and exuberant trajectories for marginal subjects (Rippl 1999, 107). Melville’s narrative trajectory is not to claim the local as limit but to make migration, particularly narrative migration, material, or materially based. This explains the mixed style that reflects her ambivalent view of diaspora from either end of the spectrum, the local or the global. By “material,” I mean to suggest some of the fleshier economies—of representing bodies and their labor—hinted at in the mimetic world cited shortly but also the strategic and uneven material circumstances that

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fuel her narrative lines: visiting Prague with an indigenous Latin American and white mixed-race couple in the collection’s title story; a parrot who moves over continents and centuries in “The Parrot and Descartes” through the accidents of colonialism and science; an older woman who takes an unplanned bus trip to town in “The Duende.” Melville’s eclectic yet somehow organic style in The Migration of Ghosts posits neither the distanced interiority of Wicomb’s collection nor the cool stance of Head’s collage of self-reflexive diaspora voices. Melville’s fictions are rendered largely with a wink and a nod, with the reader always one step behind the marvelous realism that, Melville suggests, should inform a worldview that remains ambivalent, unfixed, and yet deeply tactile and humanist in its projected futures.20 While stories such as the title story, “The Parrot and Descartes,” and especially “Erzulie” tempt with their seemingly clear and direct line to postcolonial discourse, it is another story waged on the front of failed romance to which I again turn to think through how Melville, like Wicomb and Head, maintains a quotidian, feminist critique of diaspora and its gendered migrations through the form of the short story and the innovations of its collective sequencing. “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival,” the second story in the collection, tracks the burgeoning love affair between members of a Caribbean immigrant community in London: middleaged, widowed Dolly da Silva, recently left by her pastor boyfriend just before their wedding, and recently widowed postman Norman Foster. This frame of courtship unfolds over the time of carnival in London. The plot is decidedly small in scale, though it starts on the incredible material of the local: “The shop isn’t built that should sell a leotard Mrs da Silva’s size” (1999, 25)—full stop, its own paragraph. Mrs da Silva’s larger-thanlife body grounds the story, quite literally, at the same time that accommodating it becomes the site of the fantastic: “On the morning of the day, Mrs da Silva, out of breath but triumphant, climbs the stairs of the Hanley Road workshop to be garbed in a giant shimmering copper tent” (25). Third World Women get to be inventive and cosmopolitan and go beyond the national imaginary in this version of diaspora as well, just as Da Silva da Silva does in Wilson Harris’s work (Melville 1997, 50). Both body and site, Mrs da Silva’s corporeal presence, and the narrative’s foregrounding of it as an extraordinary spectacle and capacious site/sight, gives a sense of the scale of Melville’s intervention into Third World Women as a sign and signifier of postcolonial “reality.” Carnival as a site to explore the power dynamics of the real through its temporary suspension is, in some ways, the root of the criticism around marvelous

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realism’s political dimensions and extends to Bakhtin’s (1984) parsing of medieval European practices of carnival as release valve, critique, resistance, metaphor, and recognition of power structures all at once. An enactment and a recognition of impossibility, carnival makes material—on and in bodies and their many forms of sociality—this desire for that which cannot, permanently, be. It is this manifestation of the unreal in the real, the fleshy economy of Mrs da Silva’s body and her thoroughly ordinary story of failed romance wrapped in a laboriously constructed, fantastic, shiny “tent” of material, that signals the marvelously real as well as that which is difficult to produce and enact. No easy solution, the fantastic takes time, money, sacrifice, and audacity for its temporary reign. Twisting the form of marvelous realism, though, the plot does not hinge on the fantastical but instead offers up the paranormal as a quotidian element of cultural exchange. In fact, it operates in the story as gossip from “her rival in life, Mrs Bannerman, a middle-weight sixtytwo year old” (1999, 29). Mrs Bannerman, “pleased both at Marjorie’s [a neighbor’s] distress and at being the first to tell Dolly da Silva about it,” proceeds to tell a story about a walking liver: “What happen with her?” she asks grudgingly. “Well,” said Mrs Bannerman conspiratorially. “Yesterday Marjorie went shopping and bought some vegetables and so on and some liver. She came home and put the liver in the fridge. She went out back again to pick up one or two more things and when she came in back,” Mrs Bannerman lowered her voice in order not to alarm any of the younger women, “the liver had got out of the fridge and was walking up de wall.” Mrs da Silva adjusted her spectacles, leaned back and stared at Mrs Bannerman. “What are you tellin’ me? Yuh mad? Liver caan’ walk.” “I am tellin’ you that the liver was walkin’ up the wall. It was about so high off the ground.” Mrs Bannerman raised her hand above her head. Mrs da Silva began to fidget with annoyance. She glared at Mrs Bannerman with scorn, then spoke to her as if she were a child. “Mrs Bannerman. The liver ain’ got no lungs. The liver caan’ breathe, so how de liver can walk up de wall?” “The liver did walk.” Mrs Bannerman bridled with resentment at Mrs da Silva’s skepticism.

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“The liver don’ have legs,” Mrs da Silva continued with infuriating logic, “and so the liver caan’ walk.” “The liver mussa did crawl.” “And how it did open the fridge door?” “I’ll tell you,” said Mrs Bannerman, bristling, the colour rising in the face. “The liver come from a cow. The cow had cancer and cancer is a livin’ thing. That’s how the liver could walk up de wall,” she announces, triumphantly. Silenced by this coup de science, Mrs da Silva snaps her mouth shut like a turtle and clenches her fists secretly under her costume. By god’s grace, she is saved from further humiliation at the hands of Mrs Bannerman by the explosive arrival of the band’s designer, Lulu Banks. (29–31) Engaging in marvelous realism and at the same time sending it up, the sequence of dialogue mimics the stakes of empiricism (the scientific “coup”) and its hierarchies while reveling in the narration which upends such discourse, or at the very least repurposes those empirical desires. The dialogical sequence of the narrative, like that of the conversation of the women on the bus in Wicomb’s story or the exclamation of the aunt at the end of “Snapshots of a Wedding,” is contained, a non sequitur regarding the major plotline. And yet the conversation about the walking liver, within its own plotless space, maintains an organizational logic, a mounting sense of narrative control and authority that is rendered meaningless if looked at through the lens of linearity (or, contentwise, rationality). This reading matches critic Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s analysis of Melville’s novel The Ventriloquist’s Tale as challenging simplistic notions of realism in representing the Caribbean in the face of a fantastic and “unknowable” universe, even and especially as it is outlined by science (2007a, 81). Yet, as with the other two texts critically read in this chapter, this moment illustrates social codes of narrative that conflict with other forms of gendered “reality”—biology, marriage contracts, economics, and so on. As Wilson Harris has commented on Melville’s work, “A tension that breaches common sense also breaches restrictive or conscriptive or death-dealing intercourse,” in this case gender-coded “gossip” providing the/a means of disrupting such metadiscourses (1996, 9). The proximity of Melville’s coterminous, sometimes competing realisms are in tension with but sometimes in collusion with dominant discourses—a narrative strategy that struggles not to be representative

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but instead to represent the constant fissures and disconnections of narrative desire itself. And so the intimacies formed among these realisms, and across the collection, are at once deeply intertwined and constantly straying out to form new and innovative connections. As Jim Hannan argues about Melville’s first short story collection, this tension is exemplary of “globalization’s cult of newness and . . . the dangers that accompany the marketing and consumption of heterogeneity” (2010, 89). Multiplicity and difference in the representation of Third World Women is not enough, then, to counter the systemic organization of subjectivity. For Melville, this mode of narration takes shape not in the abrupt shifts of narrative tone and perspective employed by Head, nor in the obsessive detail of Wicomb’s prose, but in the quick and messy coming together of these various registers of meaning making: All heroes must go through an ordeal to win their lady. Norman Foster had left it too late to join Mrs da Silva’s band. His retirement had gone through the week before. His loneliness bore down on him as he realised that he would no longer pass Dolly da Silva’s front door twice a day on his postman’s round and he appreciated for the first time how much of his emotional life revolved round the possibility of seeing her. And so, on the morning of carnival, with some anguish, he went up to his bedroom and took his wife’s clothes out of the cupboard where they had remained since her death four years earlier. He laid them on the bed, went down on his knees beside the bed and spoke. “Hilda. I want fi you to help me one more time. I know you wouldn’t want me to be lonely. I tink I have a chance with Mrs da Silva. I don’ want fi you to be jealous. I always have the greatest respeck for you. But I tired to keep struggling on my own here. I hope you could understand.” It seemed to him the clothes said yes. (1999, 41–42) The sequence takes us through a mash of epic quest narratives, individualist struggles, labor concerns, melodramas, mourning rituals, religious epiphanies, and the materialities of shaping a marvelously real narrative authority. The narrative mix employs so many tools as to render a through line incoherent, except that, again, it keeps some sort of organization, or moving forward, of the narrative within a less-than-a-page space. Asking the reader to suspend reading for narratives of identity or identification, Melville’s prose also asks the audience to “seem” to say “yes” to a diaspora hybridity that is impossible to fully “decode” or

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separate into us/them, colonizer/colonized, immigration/nation, and so on. In other terms, she asks us not to suspend our disbelief but to incorporate disbelief into our interpretative strategies around representing Third World Women—and by disbelief here I mean to give up our sense of needing coherent plots and characters that feel “real” or that confirm the stories we already tell about gendered diaspora experience. And while many of the stories in The Migration of Ghosts engage more directly with the traditional sphere of the political (“The President’s Exile,” “Erzulie,” “The Parrot and Descartes,” and the title story, as I mentioned before), the links between and among the stories remain eccentric and anomalous in their ambivalent temporalities of colonial intervention, recalling Puri’s analysis of the “syncretic reality” of Caribbean fiction from the last chapter (1993, 105). “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival,” the second story in the collection, follows on the heals of “The President’s Exile,” a story about the fake funeral/death of a returning dictator figure to an unnamed South American country, and is followed by two very domestically located stories, one about an elderly woman seeking affective connection in “The Duende” and the other about a woman suffering from cancer in “Lucifer’s Shank.” These latter three are among the stories in the collection that seem to have very little to do with the political as it is typically rendered. But rather than consider those stories in sequence as filler informed by or bled into from the more overt political and ecological crises of, say, “Erzulie,” a story about globalization and its devastating effects on developing countries with natural resources, I suggest a reading of The Migration of Ghosts that, like the microrealisms within “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival” itself, offers more than just local-color rest stops. Instead, The Migration of Ghosts offers, in a sense, broad time zones of contact, realisms that engage “business unbegun” not through subject matter, per se, but through narrative strategies of deeply ordinary, yet deeply strange and idiosyncratic engagements with the world, whether they take place in the postcolony or the metropole. Melville’s eccentric narrative aesthetics do not offer, then, the comfort of sustained critique or resistance. Instead, the collection offers coincidental, accidental, and temporary cohabitations of difference, in the form of discursive genealogies of race, gender, and diaspora that stand in uncomfortable proximity to one another. Performing a humanism without the comforts of solidarity, Melville’s construction of Third World Women’s representational binds favors the unexpected energies of constant change and migration over recognizable intimacies. These moments inhabit the privilege of sophisticated narrative technique and prose style while

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exposing the structures of diaspora as difficult and surprising ones to maintain and sustain across any stable sense of history or geography; they also claim such a balancing act as a feminist one and a continued ethical responsibility of the field. To return to the piece of text I started with, Wicomb’s Frieda Shenton defending her representational strategy by deflecting it onto a wider community of readers, I would like to note what I think of as a telling slip in narrative reason: “But they’re only stories. Made up. Everyone knows it’s not real, not the truth” ([1987] 2011, 172). The multiplicity of stories (“they’re”) falls into a singular category (“it’s”), a migration in reverse of reproductive tendencies and in line with the monolithic categorization of African diaspora women’s writing as an obvious, uncomplicated reflection of reality, where the “particular rendition” of one narrative is read as the “aggregate condition of the postcolony” (Bahri 2003, using Memmi, 127). In the frames of the individual stories I read here, but also in the organization of “the collection” as a body of disparate details that speak to, through, and against one another, Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and Pauline Melville suggest alternate ways of reading Third World Women, without abandoning fictional representation altogether. The practice of feminist intellectual representation that Mohanty calls for mirrors Wicomb’s own critique of realism and realist reception; she says, “No form is inherently conservative or progressive. My other problem with the real world school is that it is patronizing. It assumes that people have limited reading skills; that they cannot infer or interpret” (Meyer and Olver 2002, 13). In this statement, and in her gloss on it in You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, Wicomb performs some of Bessie Head’s strange version of “indomitable optimism” (Lionnet 1993, 149), in which producing and reproducing the “ugly” stories of Third World Women does not have to mean an aesthetic or political stagnation, or tragedy, and can instead include in its form a critique of the limits of representation itself. In this way, the “ghosts” of various histories—mythic, colonial, personal, spectral, psychic—found through each of these texts represent the impossible migrations that Third World Women, as subjects, are expected to make in the name of local, national, and diasporic community.21 Instead, Head, Wicomb, and Melville turn those structural histories themselves into ghosted presences that are more readily recognized in the decidedly small spaces where gender, race, and diaspora interact in their work. Living with these ghosts is not traumatic as much as it is

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rendered as an ambivalent fact of the diaspora, albeit differently inhabited within and across the collections. In employing the prose form but organizing it through the work of short fiction collections, these three texts place a premium on the idea of contact not as inevitable plot but as considered and sometimes inconsiderate intimacies between postcolonial sites, not just between margin and center. In doing so, they suggest an understanding of diaspora women’s writing and a transnational feminist politics of location that employs unexpected routes even in what can appear as expected conventions. As it stands, the short fiction collection can perform both intimacy and distance, a kind of disaggregated selection whereby we, as critical readers, are asked to link together meanings out of disparate, complicated, and mobile parts. These collections upend what we “know” as the blueprints for “true” fictions about gender, race, power, and their inevitable, unpredictable shifts in the African diaspora. The next chapter retains the form of a disparate collection but dislocates fiction altogether to ask if perhaps a turn away from narrative could be a turning point in conceptualizing diaspora as an interpretive tool of difference.

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Impossible Objects: M. NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, and the Diaspora Feminist Aesthetics of Accumulation

fixing her lips to sing hip strutters ditty bop hand-me-down dance of ample style stance and substance black-eyed pearl around the world girl somebody’s anybody’s yo-yo Fulani —harryette mullen, Muse & Drudge The impossibility of writing epic in our age—innermost epic as distinct from virtuoso performance, epic that alters the surfaces of language—may not be an impossibility after all. . . . Rather claims of impossibility may suggest difficulty in assessing—with an open mind—the emergence of such epic, difficulty in arriving within the medium of a new criticism that does not take the genesis of fiction for granted, the genesis of science for granted. —wilson harris, “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror” But what is it impossible to think, and what kind of impossibility are we faced with here? —michel foucault, The Order of Things

“No language is neutral,” Canadian diaspora poet Dionne Brand flatly states in her 1990 poem and eponymous collection; the innovative realisms of the previous chapter, as well as the various mixed-genre techniques of all of the texts studied in this book, take pains to explicate what, on its surface, seems a basic claim. Literary representation, as an act of language, is fraught with the historical and systemic violence that brought it into formation and into use. In the texts studied across

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Difficult Diasporas, the presence of this loaded language itself is always in tension with the imaginative locations it promises to animate. At once bleak and optimistic, these mobile identifications with language—present, insistent, consuming—represent the urgent desire, possibly even need, for the writers of Difficult Diasporas to write and think differently about the possibilities for representing black women’s subjectivity. At the same time, these texts point to a recognition of the totalizing impossibility of doing so, inasmuch as language itself is a limit that can be played with, recycled, reordered, but not altogether side-stepped or abolished. So, then, for the innovative poetics at the heart of this chapter, what is the use of poetry, in particular, and the kind of epic, nonnarrative, booklength experiences of innovation that African American poet Harryette Mullen and Caribbean Trinidadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip fashion, specifically? The first epigraph, from Mullen’s book-length poem Muse & Drudge, textually enacts the questions of representative impossibility of the previous chapter, here via an accumulation of references that include a floating object, “somebody’s anybody’s / yo-yo Fulani.” In referencing the Fulani, nomadic peoples of western Africa, and Lola Falana, black and Cuban multigenre star, in a single linguistic play, Muse & Drudge manages to capture the movement and the constraint of diaspora feminist practice—its failures of coherence and its potential for unexpected affiliation in the same breath. Mullen’s text emphasizes style, taking pleasure in and making itself pleasurable to read with its linguistic play; it holds a stance, a position in a field of analysis, by confidently “fixing” itself and its subject in linguistic practice; it sustains a substantive depth of meanings and readings while also circulating “around” and of the diasporic “world.” But it also “fails” on a number of levels. Like the previous chapter’s texts, Mullen’s book is a collection of sorts, a nonnarrative poem composed entirely of quatrains, each packed with an unimaginable number of references to diaspora. As such, it represents an aesthetics of accumulation that refuses allegorical readings done in the name of Third World Women. But its parts can only and at best offer fleeting connections to one another, with no characters or narrative to flow through the book-length form. Mullen, and her contemporary M. NourbeSe Philip, offer up an aesthetics of diaspora as unassimilable relation, not affiliative understanding. In this, they simultaneously figure, excavate, and concatenate the impossible in their nonnarrative forms of diaspora (Spivak 1999). Philip has publicly recognized this negotiation with innovative poetic form as “hav[ing] to do with our history and how much the colonial powers

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attempted to restrict us and put us into categories and forms. There is very much a sense of wanting to explore and explode those restrictions and to see where it takes you” (Saunders 2005, 215). Moving away from narrative’s explanatory force, Mullen and Philip have invented flexible formats for exposing representative orders, past and present, and innovatively linking them together to signal orders yet to come for diaspora and for black women as subjects in and of it. Those orders include and in fact center on black women as the impossible objects of interdisciplinary study, impossible in that they represent the pinnacle of intersectional difficulty and academia’s perhaps greatest failures to “adequately” represent, describe, or do justice to their full range of subjectivity (Wiegman 2011, 250). This “inadequacy of the imagination” that writers and critics of African diaspora women’s agency might betray or decry is “exhausting” (Wiegman 2011, 230). Rather than vault the Third World Woman into the privileged position of the impossible subaltern subject who must be given justice by any means necessary, Mullen’s and Philip’s texts join Gayatri Spivak and Robyn Wiegman in recognizing the debate around Third World Women’s representation as a process that hinges on such false narratives of justice. Those prescriptive narratives spring even from those of us claiming to undo the order of things—the powerful narratives of domination/subjection that have come to monolithically define the subject we are now refusing to represent or claiming to represent better. Spivak’s impossibility is not a refusal of representation, then, but a laying out of how even the representation of impossible representation maintains a fiction of order: “A just world must entail normalization; the promise of justice must attend not only to the seduction of power, but also to the anguish that knowledge must suppress difference, . . . that a fully just world is impossible, forever deferred and different from our projections” (1999, 199). Harryette Mullen and M. NourbeSe Philip have dedicated their writing lives to a refusal of completion and coherence, a “mistrust of language” that digs deeper into not just the wounds it inflicts that are impossible to heal but the possibilities and even joys in its repurposing. Impossibility, for these authors, brings not retreat or retrenchment but a methodology that lays the incommensurate objects and affects entailed in representing black women in the diaspora next to one another, not in the narrative form of a new story but as an ongoing act of exposing the range of the existing order. In their epic but nonnarrative forms, they claim the excessive knowledges of a diaspora too big to accurately chart, of black women as subjects too great and vast to know. These

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accumulations act as points of, if not optimism, then at least a break in the stories we as interdisciplinary critics of race, gender, and geography tell ourselves about location, embodiment, history, modernity, and representation itself in the service of progressive politics. Mullen’s and Philip’s poetics imagine not a new world but this world, as it is, as it stands not in the “end” of its plot but in the constant middle. In doing so, they figure the terrain of “impossibility” itself, the subject yet to be that is unpredictable and heterotopic. The black woman as “generous” subject is the ambivalent subject of Muse & Drudge and She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks— how, as trope, she has been lent out, expanded, expended at high cost. But, as these texts’ form and frame argue, facing such a genealogy of use does not have to mean a locking down of meaning. In this, poetic form, particularly their engagement of the lyric form, is a significant site of this tension and possibility. Debates over the lyric’s worth versus the serious “skill” of language poetry (mentioned in the introduction) stem from “the impossibility of an adequate description of the poetic genre” (Müller-Zettelmann and Rubik 2005, 9) and concerns over the racial and gendered limits of the conventional lyric (Frost 1995; A. Robbins 2010). Such “anxiety about contamination” also haunts many discourses surrounding race, academic disciplinarity, and the category of “diaspora”— a failure of definition that hinges on a narrow understanding of specificity and its uses (Müller-Zettelmann and Rubik 2005, 10). This formal genealogy of avant-garde lyric form, rather than one of content, emphasizes the tool of “verbal skill”—which is necessary for both the oral and the written—as one that is politically developed, emerging out of a keen sense of doubleness or difference.1 Mullen herself speaks eloquently of bringing race and the avant-garde in conversation or into identification with each other more often, since their formations are concurrent (2002, 30). Bringing these categories together is not unheard of, of course, but it is seen as marginal black practice or tokenism in the avant-garde. Mullen’s and Philip’s poetics are, then, as much feminist, antiracist strategies as they are passionate engagements with dominant culture, articulating a desire to communicate differently across “a continuum of alliances” (Spahr 2001, 101). Lyric poetry is, then, a form that is both desperately individual and communal at the same time, much like the blues form with which this book opened. Its “I” traditionally “generates the humanist illusion of totality and presence,” as Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes it, a “personable presence” that is reordered and fragmented in what she names a

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feminist history of poetry (1985, 103). Mullen’s and Philip’s revised lyrics engage an “I,” attempt to speak to what we might call affectual experience, but imagine by the act of writing/publishing/performing in a somewhat recognizable, reproducible, and repeated form, a collectivity of reception—an ability and a desire to have the reciprocity of reading in common. As such, they are both a representation of radical difference, inasmuch as any individually authored performance is, and of similarity, posited as connection and recognition of some part of the “I” for the reader. “Sapphire’s lyre styles,” Muse & Drudge begins, and to invoke these styles is also to invoke the textual and generic scale of Mullen’s and Philip’s authorial projects, from the mother of the lyric to the estranged sister narratives of raced and gendered representation across the black diaspora—unconventional “muse relations,” as DuPlessis names the invocation of inspirations who are also cultural workers (1985, 127–28). Radical global performers, if you will, Muse & Drudge and She Tries Her Tongue are certain to surprise in “style” as well as their accumulation of substance. Such unusual collections prompt me to ask if we could further push their generic boundaries. If “a border orders disorder,” can these strange mixes of borrowed lines, language, and formatting also be considered types of intellectual/critical collections, a grouping of related discursive pieces under the sign of diaspora feminism (Mullen 1995, 8)? If you will allow me this leap in formalism, I would like to consider the possibilities that these final texts display and engage the anthologizing impulses of interdisciplinarity, of new field formations, especially in their re-presentations of the various histories of transnational feminism, African diaspora studies, and their genealogies in the academy as well as their attendant collections of essays meant to solidify such subfields. Mullen’s own characterization of her speaking subjects in Muse & Drudge is one way into the anthology form of the book-length text, as she states that nearly every “I” used in the text is a direct quote, rendering even the speakerly a readerly collection (Mullen 1997). In Juliana Spahr’s Everybody’s Autonomy, the poet-critic outlines a series of readings of particularly innovative texts, including Muse & Drudge. Her purpose is to think about how form, particularly difficult, book-length refusals of linear clarity in poetry and poetic prose, produces “readerly” texts, or ones that create a certain community and experience of how to read, interpret, and organize that which lacks the clarity of normative syntax, chronology, and narrative. In doing so, Spahr attempts to counter readings of formal innovation which place high literacy and interpretation along a

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parallel with “assimilation” and domination (2001, 122). Her argument about Mullen’s purposeful construction of a wide reading community across racial and formal borders through “alternative literacies” mirrors this book’s mapping of alternative feminist practices of reading—not as a policing of new and somehow more responsible routes but as a way of catching something beyond or alongside mimetic representation as the “sign” of engagement for interpreting African diaspora women writers. Gender, race, and location track formally as well as through more familiar channels of reference in Difficult Diasporas, tracing those genealogies and the connections between the public, the popular, and the marginal in the difficult terrain of black women’s writing. As both exhaustive catalogues of the existing structures for race and gender and networks of surprising connection themselves, these final texts offer us the powerful intimacy of the book format even as they ask us, in their recombinant forms and structures, to generatively migrate our attentions “elsewhere” (McKittrick 2006). The range of both diasporic objects and reading strategies is encyclopedic in both texts, suggesting that diaspora is a form of inquiry sustained by a descriptive depth of impossibility and excess that Philip and Mullen maintain in their work. Muse & Drudge and She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks produce uncomfortable, sometimes unwelcome recognitions of critical interdependence that force the reader to commit to new routes of diaspora literacy. It is not just the objects of study—like women in the collections of the previous chapter—that accumulate in this formulation of diaspora but interpretation itself that multiplies and becomes the means of sustaining inquiry into gender, race, and location. Defiantly noncommittal to generic and identitarian rules of representation, Mullen’s innovative linguistic practice is a different version of hailed exchange, in which reciprocity, for Muse & Drudge, is not found in devotion to disciplinary narrative. In Mullen’s book-length, nonnarrative poem composed of interchangeable quatrains, she invokes ancient Greek poet Sappho in her opening line: “Sapphire’s lyre styles” (1995, 1). The great-great-and-then-some-grandmother of the lyric form hovers over the text, as surely as “Sapphire” herself, the embodiment of “sassiness,” or the difficult, verbally emasculating stereotype of black femininity (Collins [1990] 2000). From the black and blue cover to the title itself, Muse & Drudge invokes the range of available black female subjectivities that Difficult Diasporas interrogates—which Mullen characterizes as existing on and exceeding the scale from Hurston’s designation

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of black women as the “mules of the world” ([1937] 2010, 29) to black women’s bodies as hypersexualized “drugs,” the near homonyms that echo in Mullen’s work of musing and drudging on this history of representation (Bedient 1996, 3). But Mullen’s text also stages the interdisciplinary, transnational, and transhistorical acts of reading gender, race, and diaspora that I have traced throughout this book. Her aesthetics of accumulation is one in which, as critic Meta Jones so artfully puts it, “Mullen’s densely allusive and elusive phrases characteristically yield an accretion of meaning through a punning pileup of words that reward multiple rereadings and rehearings” (2011, 160). Proper names, places, and turns of phrase layer over each other in each quatrain, creating a complex, impossible subject or series of subjects. Mullen’s own gloss of Saartjie Baartman’s public performance of the Venus Hottentot demonstrates the familiar layering of black women’s representation with the cosmopolitan migrations of diaspora. Like Elizabeth Alexander’s and Deborah Richards’s re-presentations of the vexed cultural legacy of Baartman, Mullen suggests not just the tense exchange between a sense of corporeal ownership and deterministic public narratives of black women’s sexuality but also the import of ways of reading that critical tension: a name determined by other names. prescribed mediation unblushingly on display to one man or all traveling Jane no time to settle down bee in her bonnet her ants underpants (1995, 2) Mullen’s subject is named and nameless, a mobile “Jane” (usually a signifier of bland white femininity) unable/refusing to get comfortable with her “prescribed” reference and the relocated pain of her popular circulation. Invaded by disciplinary narratives—here etymological and entomological—Mullen’s feminist aesthetic strategies do not have the luxury of settling on one mode of representation or of interpretation. Evie Shockley rightly notes that this range of referents and, indeed, subjects, reads against the “appearance of continuity” (2011, 98) in the uniform pages of the texts. As the juxtaposition of the popular mode of critical representation and the reframed traveling referent suggests, public scripts act as an impossible guest, a fungible set of nuisances and

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figurations that demand in their very form conceptual thought—diagnostic “mediation”—as well as a certain flexibility within the structures of quatrains, colloquialisms, and puns alike, in Mullen’s rendering. Read through this lens, Mullen’s “traveling Jane” is more symptom than agent, perennially on the move for the purpose of critiquing and refusing the narrative stability of progress. As this book’s comparative strategy suggests, we can read Mullen’s mobile objects as in difficult relation to other lost objects, from Sappho’s styles to that range of abandoned “types” referred to in the title of Muse & Drudge: I dream a world and then what my soul is resting but my feet are tired half the night gone I’m holding my own some half forgotten tune casual funk from a darker back room handful of gimme myself when I am real how would you know if you’ve never tasted a ramble in the brambles the blacker more sweeter juicier pores sweat into blackberry tangles going back native natural country wild briers (1995, 3) From the future of diaspora—“I dream a world”—to the past of the “half forgotten” public memory of “funk[ier]” cultural representations of race and gender, Mullen interrogates epistemological positionality when it comes to the territory, the “brambles,” where diaspora studies and feminism converge: “how would you know / if you’ve never tasted” that invented world of representation? Mullen asks, charging us to explore our own expectations of narrative interpretation. As Michael Magee gestures toward in his reading of her experimental poetics (alongside other American poets), Mullen’s form suggests “democratic symbolic action” in practice, rather than in representational narrative (2004, 23).2

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Mullen’s “traveling Jane” contains/accumulates many attendant referents, from Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry to the exhausting scope that the Martin Luther King, Jr., reference to black rhetoric sets out and sets up as the form(s) of diaspora. “Bittersweet and inescapable” as her textual through-line, the resonance (and dissonance) of diaspora across fields is embodied in Mullen’s revisionary lyric form in Muse & Drudge. With poetry’s emphasis on the romantic, the abstract, the interior, Adorno voiced the most trenchant criticism of the form of the lyric when he condemned all of poetry to be “barbaric” post-Holocaust (1989, 34). The brutality of international politics, and the culture produced in its midst, demands a certain materiality, he seems to argue, a specific historical investment that a genre such as the lyric, known for its natural and amorous subjects, cannot contain—hence the overwhelming turn to narrative fiction and the novel when representing “weighty” historical subjects such as the diaspora. But, of course, the lyric has continued on in poetry since modernism and postmodernism, most particularly associated with women, queer, and nonwhite practitioners. Mullen’s refusal of lyric’s “I,” which is the “code” for its debased status as the poetic home for those who are engaged in identity politics, is clearly not just an escape from those criticisms. Instead, Muse & Drudge begins with the hybrid of black female stereotype “Sapphire,” discussed earlier, and ancient lyric poet Sappho, an “I” who is not an autobiographical or, hence, confessional speaker.3 Mullen’s link to Sappho is similar in its genealogical strategy of not narrativizing a singular, authentic “I.” Perhaps, Mullen suggests, there is a tradition of innovation that can be traced back to Sappho, of signifying on difference. If Saartjie Baartman can be the family entrepreneur/intellectual, remade by Alexander’s poetics that refuse to honor only the extremes of a limited vocabulary ascribed to black vernacular, then Mullen’s can trace aesthetic lines from Sappho to Sapphire, from lyric poetry to the blues, as alternate “traditions” of innovation linked to social difference. In this effort, she is always making numerous critical interventions at once: disentangling formal innovation as some kind of white postmodern break with all that came before it; emphasizing the “speakerly” qualities and debates of the Western canon; and refusing to limit diaspora literature and diaspora studies to slave  / Middle Passage genealogies of vernacular expression and speakerliness, instead focusing on how the writerly and the speakerly can and do draw from those complex genealogies of difference and form.4 She not only rereads the potential source for diaspora feminism as shaped by the Western/canonical but also rereads the very same canon

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differently with her text. Mullen’s “I’s” are never easy, clear expressions of authentic identities, even when posed as such by authors and critical discourse, nor are they as aesthetically bounded as one might initially assign their seeming individualism. Critic Robin Tremblay-McGaw thinks through this “recyclopedic” form of representing subjectivity as the “productive tension between ‘enclosure’ and ‘run,’ between an archive of cultural, linguistic, and historical references, images, and information and the fugitivity that is both a thematics and a formal strategy” (2010, 72). Mullen’s fugitive archive, then, to combine Tremblay-McGaw’s terms askance, is audacious, “committ[ed] to highlighting” its wide and roaming range of referents: get a new mouth don’t care what it costs smell that hot sauce shake it down south (1995, 8) The “new” mouth is linked to movement, to sensation, to material experience, at the same time that it exceeds it—“don’t care what it costs.” Defiantly noncommittal to disciplinary rules of representing race and gender, innovative linguistic practice is a different version of exchange, in which the purify brothers clamor for rhythm ain’t none of they business till the ring is on the finger (8) This adjoining quatrain asserts an exuberant resistance to narratives of critical purity (Mix 2005, 80). Reciprocity, for Muse & Drudge, is not devotion to disciplinary or disciplined discourse, the lure of “becom[ing] enthralled to an object of study that must conform to the shape of its critical desires” (Wiegman 2011, 250). The nonnarrative, encyclopedic “rhythm” becomes the point—or, rather, the particulars of the complex network that Mullen reads as and into the diaspora. Exceptional or representational status is cause for both movement and lament in Muse & Drudge’s lyric worlds: try others but none lasted a shame they went that way missing referents murking it up with clear actors lacking

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too tough is tough enough to walk these dirty streets with us too loud too strong too black bad too many desires you’ve never met (1995, 12) Retuning to the (in)fidelity of reference that marked Alexander’s and Richards’s poetics, Mullen’s “you” here is longing both for connection and for the manufacturing of critical desire itself. The lyric is “too black bad” for full comprehension, stuck in the repetition of sexual-racial linguistic patterns—knives and flowers, “songs” that cut.5 But rather than an “I” which closes down the possibility for communion, Mullen’s is promiscuous, with a keen eye and ear for the consequences of such straying—a “public subject,” in Allison Cummings’s terms, who is knowing about its critical reception (2005, 7). Here is where we can turn from reading Mullen merely as a complex renovation of externally produced diaspora subjection and subjectivity to Mullen’s larger project of investigating the textual and speakerly patterns and idiosyncrasies circulating as narrative itself. Rather than proving alternate critical practices as either false or beside the point, Mullen imagines them as the aforementioned theorists have characterized the lyric—abstract and also holding the impossible, temporary promise of an escape from the totality and teleology of narrative: forgotten formula cures endemic mnemonic plague statisticians were sure the figures were vague (1995, 28) The ways that lyric language promises to “bring money bring love,” to “restore lost nature,” are rendered through rational discourse of meaning or definition (28). Instead of denying the language of the Enlightenment, Mullen engages it, displays it, and plays it. Muse & Drudge’s quatrains are fixed on the excess of language in the cultural realm, an encyclopedic twist on lyric’s intense focus on the poetic and figurative value of aesthetics. Addiction to narrative—public, academic, identitarian—can take conscious or unconscious form in Muse & Drudge. Mullen’s text courses through this confessed, visible obsession, moving though official and unofficial registers with the same “exuberant” conflict I mentioned earlier: hooked on phonemes imbued with exuberance

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our spokeswoman listened for lines heard tokens of quotidian corralled in ludic routines slumming umbra alums lost some of their parts getting a start in the department of far art monkey’s significant uncle blond as a bat took off beat path through tensile jungle dark work and hard though any mule can knock down the barn what we do best requires finesse (49) Claiming transnational feminist contingencies of location as (ac)cumulative, Mullen argues that what “we do best” requires “exuberance,” in the eye of the disciplinary “corral.” Near-rhymes, repetition, persistent assonance, and sharp, one-syllable words that jostle against one another punctuate this physical page of Muse & Drudge, emphasizing the connective and contentious discursive practices it references. Framed not as an “I” but as a “we,” the process of both reading and speaking are rendered as group agency, a lyric of the “ludic routines”—“corralled” or limited in its ability to “play” with the everyday constraints of a disciplinary culture. “Far art” moves to scientific reason (“monkey’s significant uncle”), the rhetorical modes of diaspora and race, academic and evolutionary at once. Thwarting comprehension—or, rather, stalling it— by taking out prepositions, this page gives us the bare bones of words, the stripped-down diaspora that lyric form demands. But rather than using a “bat,” a “beat,” or “knock[ing] down the barn,” Mullen calls on “our spokeswoman” to do the “dark work” of negotiating complex pathways through linguistic landmines—to employ the lyric, in other words, in response to and in resistance of the battery of “lost . . . parts” that constitute black women’s narrative presence in the diaspora. In a sense, Mullen lays out the condition of generic practices of both poetics and academic discourse. Specific incidents of genre and intellectual practice are different but hold within the frame of recognizability—a conceptual limit. A larger pattern of narrative emerges here as

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one which could also align Muse & Drudge’s exuberant exploration of various modes of genre and representation with the acts of interdisciplinarity itself. Mullen herself thinks of such innovative “routine” as a compilation of “magical parts” (Frost 2000, 415) and as a testing of those diffuse yet somehow intimate objects through and within formal restraints—the fugitive archive again or the lyric in the epic: software design for legible bachelors up to their eyeballs in hype-writer fonts didn’t call you ugly—said you was ruined that’s all pass the paperbag whether vein texts the wild blue blood to the bone spin the mix fast forward mutant taint of blood mongrel cyborg mute and dubbed (1995, 42) Testing our ideas of the internal and structural as well as the external and variable, Mullen does not hide under the guise of mastery or deep substance. A “paperbag” is all that holds and separates the “legible bachelors” from the “ruined,” the “mongrel cyborg / mute and dubbed.” It is the ludic routine and its interruption that produces such hybridity; play is the quotidian, in other words, cut through with the attempted and failing imposition of order and structure through narrative. As such, black women are rendered the found objects of interdisciplinary practice. But in its unpredictable timing, in the access that interdisciplinarity, or indeed the lyric “I,” individual and communal at once, brings to the “test” of cultural limits, “mute and dubbed” no longer stands as a strictly dubious practice. Expecting failure, or something akin to a social science “test,” Muse & Drudge is allowed to account for and revel in the affiliations of language that bring such wide swaths of information to the discursive table without the need to push for coherence and completion.

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Mullen’s work is not afraid of the inorganic, of calling out the ostentatious mixing of metaphors that characterizes those difficult social and critical practices: flunked the pregnancy test mistimed space probe, she aborted legally blind justice, she miscarried scorched and salted earth, she’s barren when Aunt Haggie’s chirren throws an all originals ball the souls ain’t got a stray word for the woman who’s wayward (39) The biological, the astronomical, the legal, the social—none have a “a stray word” from their strict narratives of and for black women as subjects, whereas Mullen has all stray words fitted into her tight form, quatrains that exceed their limits of meaning. Yet these modes’ very constitution as narratives—as opposed to metaphors or lyric form—foregrounds their inorganic nature; the pageantry of “original[ity],” and origins, that often circulates under the sign of diaspora, likewise, has little room to account for alternate routes of diaspora representation or interpretation. Trinidadian Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip, in her piece “Clues,” frames her diaspora feminist quest for what she calls “the mother tongue” with a quote from the Odyssey in the first section of her booklength innovative project She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks: It would take a long time to name the land and seas over which the goddess wandered. She searched the whole word—in vain . . . Clues She gone—gone to where and don’t know Looking for me looking for she; Is pinch somebody pinch and tell me, Up where north marry cold I could find she— Stateside, England, Canada—somewhere about, “she still looking for you— try the Black Bottom—Bathurst above Ballor, Oakwood and Eglinton—even the suburbs them, But don’t look for indigo hair and skin of lime at Ontario Place, Or even the reggae shops;

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Stop looking for don’t see and can’t— You bind she up tight tight with hope, She own and yours knot up in together; Although she tight with nowhere and gone She going find you, if you keep looking.” (1989, 30) Philip begins her project with failure—the failure of completion, the failure of definition, the failure that undergirds classical Western narrative—and moves into a description of the illogical “hope” that yokes the seeker and the perpetually lost object together over various geographic, psychic, and discursive terrains. The process she suggests in this quote is not just about language but about the process by which we come to know and to produce knowledge about the African diaspora and black women’s writing; Philip names, rather than the postcolonial “condition,” our unease with the communal failure of our fields to fully articulate and name such a condition in totality—for the way they keep us moving in circles, backtracking, refusing the intellectual satisfaction of both the familiar (reggae shops) and the unknown (“nowhere and gone”), mapped onto contested landscapes of the local and the global, the real and the abstract. This accumulative terrain of failure, far from “don’t see and can’t,” becomes Philip’s strategy of radical inclusion—or, as one critic names it, a politics and poetics of “by all means necessary” (Kang 2009, 1). If language itself is the key concept of She Tries Her Tongue, then its form acts out the drama (and history) of language, structurally and stylistically, as many critics have noted. The book starts with a lengthy prose “introduction” titled “The absence of writing or how I became a Spy,” exhibiting both the didactic force and commitment to opaque play that characterize Philip’s innovative writing. In the introduction, Philip articulates this designation of She Tries Her Tongue as “the confrontation between the formal and the demotic within the text itself” (1989, 18). The demotic, a term used to refer to Greek and Egyptian quotidian written discourse, is key here; using the demotic instead of the vernacular is a textual choice reflective of just such a “confrontation”—it connotes classical reference even as it denotes the popular. Rather than choosing or having a battle in which one “wins” or is marked a better, more authentic, or somehow original language of inquiry, Philip is lyrical in her diasporic methodology. A former attorney, she seeks the power of description, not definition, issuing a “challenge . . . to use the language in such a way that the historical realities are not erased or obliterated, so

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that English is revealed as the tainted tongue it truly is. Only in so doing will English be redeemed” (19). Leaving space for innovations of form and language, Philip’s essay emphasizes aesthetics as the frontier for the diaspora writer and for diaspora thought itself. Critics have taken up Philip’s work as a challenge to the reception of “Caribbean Women’s Writing” which does not conform to nationalist politics (Saunders 2005) and, for one critic, as a quest which leads not back “home” but to the temporality of exile (Mahlis 2005). All of this is rendered, and can only be rendered for Philip, at the level of discourse, of language and its “break,” the ultimately failing form of narrative representation that “render[s] the African body (un)readable” (Kinnahan 2004, 81; see also Saunders 2008 and Carr 1994). Philip’s reordered lyric subjects are not puns but more the ludic pileup of linguistic violence on top of the historical and material violence done to black women as subjects. Her response is not one of restoring mimetic visibility to black women but instead of giving visibility to the coded and covered discourses that undergird these violences (Kinnahan 2004, 81).6 If Mullen’s sequencing provides an opportunity to read the order of the particular unit (the quatrain) into or against the representational and narrative logic of recognizing “the self” and “the other,” then Philip conducts an experiment on the equation of diaspora itself—one that starts in the “meanwhile,” the first word of the collection. Philip’s aesthetic mathematics in She Tries Her Tongue attempt to calculate the “nowhere and gone” from both sides of the book-as-object, where “you plus I equals we / I and I and I equals I / minus you” crawls into the middle dip of the open book (1989, 48). This quote from “African Majesty,” a two-page poem that constitutes an entire eponymous section of She Tries Her Tongue, is set in the context of transnational African “influence,” that of the “Museum” that the parenthetical subtitle references: “(The Barbara and Murray Frum Collection).” Philip attempts to quantify the cumulative effects of history at the level of language—the available language of subjectivity (the pronouns you, I, and we) coming up against the repetition of “circles of plexiglass  / death  / circles of eyes  / circles for the eyes”—the source of “knowledge” disseminated around Africa and African history that shapes postcolonial contact narratives. Philip performs and deconstructs the onslaught of the English colonizers’ language as itself an epistemic violence, one that registers in the literal form of the book. She Tries Her Tongue begins to play with the pace of the book, tucking enjambed lines into the middle fold and eventually lining up different stanzas unevenly, side by side. Breaking our assumed

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familiarity with language and reading practices, Philip’s textual design presents uncomfortable proximities between discursive registers, both official and poetic.7 It is precisely in this book-length, unevenly distributed form that we can find an intimacy with the text through our focused reading as well as an open conversation with the “incomplete” language of colonial historicity, as we are forced to confront how it overdetermines every critical act, even reading (Saunders 2001, 133). The goal, for Philip, is not to find a “better” exchange rate, so to speak, but to minutely document and confront us with impossible accumulations of historical, cultural, and discursive violence, where constructions of “primitive aesthetics” refuse to be “absolve[d].” “In the elsewhere of time,” “African Majesty” finds, instead, the simultaneity of the material real—“lead knees eyes drop eastward”—and the “imaginary” in the “once-upon-a-time-either-way” dimensions of postcontact culture and identity. Locating precontact aesthetics, another way of designating an “authentic” collective diaspora identity, is an impossible task for Philip from the start and for the other authors Difficult Diasporas tracks. But, as Zora Neale Hurston’s characteristic “will to adorn” suggests, and Philip follows in her claim to be “adorning the word with meaning,” there is still something generative to be found in aesthetic acts, something akin to how we choose to “mourn the meaning in loss.” It is that choice, the aesthetic, in cultural expression and critical intellectual practice that can break the repetition of the narratives of colonial histories and ontologies of race and gender—the untimely disruptions of adornment that give potentially new meaning to the failures of diaspora pasts, presents, and futures. By “new” meaning, I do not so much mean reinvented as strategically redeployed to disorder readers’ sense of what can be asked, and what signs and signifiers can be legible, when studying colonialism, racism, and their attendant systems of domination through narration. To engage, then, in the “deep structure” (as Philip references Chomsky; 1989, 23) of the demotic in English is, for Philip, to find a “page-bound” form that is not necessarily mimetic or narrative in any traditional sense of the term. She Tries Her Tongue ranges widely in formal strategy, performing in broad structure and organization the “confrontation” that Philip outlines in her introduction. The book is broken up into sections of poetry, the first being a poem cycle based on Roman mythology. Using classical reference, the pieces begin with quasi-epigraphs from a translation of Ovid before diving into more standard free verse poems with the beginning of typographical shifts in text placement. The next section,

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“Cyclamen Girl,” is also a sequence, this time based on a 1950 photograph of “blackgirl white dress” (38)—a black girl on her first communion day. Similarly slightly askew, it nonetheless functions formally within familiar territory. But as the external influence of titling continues, the poetry seems to reorganize itself more forcefully. The following sections are each composed of only one short poem, whose title provides the section title; these sections have a more fractured and repetitious style than their predecessors. The final five sections are composed of the radical inclusion of external source texts, collaged together with innovative layout and with page breaks gathering even more significance. Given this organization, the “collection” Philip stages is more book than independent poems, with sections running like chapters, sequentially building a difficult diaspora based on language and its historical and cultural ruptures. This progression moves, eventually, even further away from the “I,” the recognizable indicator of the speaking subject, in its citational modes of collage. As the repetitive calculation of connection and loss threaten to override—or disappear from—the page, not from the margins but from the center, Philip’s text begins to peel away from the “I” altogether, creating a progressive sequence of left-to-right readings that move toward quotation and citation of “scientific” texts on speech, language, and behavior. This sequencing perhaps reaches its climax in the section titled “Discourse on the logic of language,” in which among other information she includes the history and science of human speech and intelligence as imagined by scientist and protoanthropologist Pierre Paul Broca, who was also referenced in Alexander’s poem, and his fellow nineteenthcentury speech scientist Carl Wernicke: “understanding and recognition of the spoken word takes place in Wernicke’s area—the left temporal lobe, situated next to the auditory cortex” (1989, 57). Critiquing the mapping of Other bodies (brain size as a mark of hierarchical difference) as well as the logic of naming itself, Philip’s text finds its own critique in its broad accumulation of referents—the geography of the brain traced along colonial geographies. The impossibility offered by the text, then, is one that places cartographic proximities and claims next to the false logic of “tests,” as we saw in Mullen, against colonial rule, indirect and direct, creating innovative formulas to assess, categorize, and validate difference. Philip’s interventions claim textual innovation as a critical intervention in reading the formation of these very borders. Mapping the equation of racial and gendered science, the text moves from multiple-choice formats to cartographies of grammar, number, and sequence—how even the history of language is a question of impossibility

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and hence a lyric subject. If Mullen’s text focuses on the playful power of rearrangement, the random sequence of portable parts as a refusal of fixed definition, then Philip here describes sequencing itself, performing control of description even as she undermines the history of language in her content and her form by forcing us into and out of our left-to-right Western comprehension, our conscious, naming intellectual practice. Hers is a violation of the logic of form itself, where the “smallest” unit offers a challenge to the equation—one that she argues constructs a constant shifting or contingency in the act of calculation: when the smallest cell remembers— how do you how can you when the smallest cell remembers lose a language (1989, 67) Loss here is as small or as significant as its most basic unit—interrupted, unpredictable syntax adding up to meaning, with our only tool being inquiry after that order, to lay bare its inorganic construction not to make way for the organic, or the real, but as Philip herself lays out, for the possibility that it is “a matter of developing it rather than finding it” (24).8 So Philip’s question here is a genuine one, one that finds—in either “discovery or development”—the power and possibility of critical “recognition” (25). Here, Philip’s key use of metamorphosis is another signpost toward hybridity, the cyborg nature of history and language. It is also a sign of the embodied quality Philip both discovers and develops in language itself. In the section “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” there is a historical cartography not just of the brain (divided into the proper territory of Broca’s and Wernicke’s “areas,” as previously quoted—the science of cognition intimately linked to discourses of ownership and discovery and hence to early comparative racialization) but of the materiality of the tongue and the “deep patterning” of the raced and gendered body in diasporic discourse. On the first page of the section, running down the middle of the page, is a progressive riff on the phrase “mother tongue,” full of repetition, near word matches, and associations. But to either side, sandwiching our straight reading of the center text, are other discourses: a passage running vertically up and down the page in all caps graphically describing mother-to-newborn-child contact via the tongue; and a reproduced

figure 6.1. A page from M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

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passage from a slave-owning manual, titled “Edict 1,” laying out the political necessity to “ensure that his slaves belong to as many ethno-linguistic groups as possible” (1989, 88), a common practice (as well as banning native speech or religious practice) to prevent communication and uprisings in slave communities. This is a confusing cartography when one expects to encounter a formatted page that is familiarly oriented, but Philip prefers instead a map of inquiry, of inextricably intertwined discourses of gender, embodiment, speech, race, and writing itself that are embedded and already hybrid. As readers, we are left with the disparate parts, usually seamlessly integrated, here with the literal mother/tongue text seeming far afield. Philip’s text makes a proximate connection for us (as do Mullen’s quatrains) but leaves us to rearrange our ways of reading, literally, to “recognize” the entanglement of all linguistic practice with histories of gender, race, diaspora, and colonialism. Like the cellular units that speak particularity to the amorphous affectual states of loss that define diaspora thought for Philip, the text here links the “logic” of language to the specificities of gendered discourse itself. While the center text pitches mother and father tongues in tension with a fractured-tongued lyric “I,” the side texts are at once excessively embodied as female and male, respectively—the rule of the body and the rule of social authority. Both side texts, however, lead into silence (of the child, as her mother’s tongue cleans her, and of the silenced slave without a common language), leading to a paradox of gendered power that always informs the question of colonialism and postcolonial resistance. As a feminist praxis, Philip’s text suggests that devotion to either “discovery or development,” exclusively, leaves one paralyzed or in silent “anguish,” as the center poem ends on the facing page (on the left side). This refusal to choose an epistemological side continues in the poem’s form, with the Wernicke section facing the first page written in textbook-style third-person objective prose and the facing page of the anguish portion (which also continues with another mother/tongue passage and “Edict II,” in the same orientation) entailing a series of four multiple-choice questions about the material tongue that attempt, in sequence, to claim relations between the tongue and the penis; the sociopolitical and biological functions of the tongue, the geography of the tongue to the body and the act of (foreign) speech; and the physical mechanics of speech to the violent histories of colonialism and chattel slavery. In each question, implied as well as directly stated, are options for “both/ all of the above” and “neither/none.” Inquiry, Philip suggests—into the mass accumulation of description, and recognition

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of the interrelation of discourses of gender, race, geography, and the body—is all we have to “choose.”9 This relentless inquiry is not without ambivalence, to Philip, Mullen, or the other authors in Difficult Diasporas. In “Universal Grammar,” the next section of She Tries Her Tongue and the one concerned with “the smallest cell,” Philip takes on the practice of parsing as a dangerous method that is deemed, on the penultimate page of the section, as “the exercise of dismembering language into fragmentary cells that forget to re-member” (1989, 66). Concerned with the ownership of language and its use, Philip diagnoses the “problematic” possibilities of her own method, if diaspora’s parts are not always placed in proximity/connection with each other. The “smallest cells”—and sometimes less—being all that is left of an archive of black diaspora history, parsing and placing migrating fragments of information in contact with one another is, as Philip sees it, a way of “gaining some control of my word and its image-making capacities,” while “control of information and production is still,” like the method of relentless parsing that her work engages in, “problematic” (12). It is the lyric possibility of parsing the parts together—their sequence and juxtaposition, either found or fixed, that creates new possibilities that do not cut off the dangers of migration and (re)circulation but do offer the constant call and agency to “spit it out / start again” (67). I refer to Philip’s active focus on verbs of the body and the embodiment of language here intentionally; critic Rinaldo Walcott dubs her use of language in this regard “verbing,” a practice of performativity that “use[s] the ambivalence of words to announce personhood and utter new possibilities” (2003, 74). Her dual commitment to materiality and lyric abstraction stands as a commitment to “deconstructing the sensible,” through actively reading the representational structures of gender, race, and location (Saunders 2001, 146). In her words, “There was a profound eruption of the body into the text of She Tries Her Tongue. In the New World, the female African body became the site of exploitations and profoundly anti-human demands—forced reproduction along with subsequent forceful abduction and sale of children. Furthermore, while the possibility of rape remains the amorphous threat it is, the female body continues to be severely circumscribed in its interaction with the physical surrounding space and place” (1989, 24). While the text has occasional mimetic representational moments with black women’s bodies, it largely takes Philip’s charge to find the page-bound demotic in ways that do not merely mimic or represent a legible set of representational strategies in speech. She brings the gendered corporeal politic to bear

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as the center of aesthetic and political inquiry into the diaspora, but not as representation in the most literal sense of that term. The “eruption” of the body is the “confrontation” between language and history—the stage, the vehicle, the part, and the thing itself. But this question of the body and the word’s relationship to it is fraught; one can ask, from the collective body, “How far down would they have to reach for a sound that would banish the future, restore the past and back their word in the present?” (1989, 74), or detail the “limbic system” as the center of “basic drives” as well as and including memory—the body as foundation to, and the source of, context and history, questioning whether “words collect historical response” (72). But it is also the case, in another section, that “without the being of word / grist in a grind and pound of together” (88)—that without language—the embodiment of contact and intimacy cannot exist or circulate. In this confrontation between being and word, Philip moves to the eruption of voice itself—body merged with word in space. It is this innovative linking of race and sexuality that Philip threads throughout her oeuvre via embodiment (Hoving 1995, 152). Adding her own addendum to “facts to remember” included in her referenced external text, “Lesson for the Voice,” she matches “(2) the larger the space, the more weight and friction I required on the consonant” (1989, 72) to “(1) within the holds of the slaveship, how much weight and friction would be necessary to convey the meaning of life?” (74). The voice is “intention sound and word together” to produce a history (72). This is one of Philip’s answers to the ambivalent question of “parsing” as a method—offering the accumulation of intention, materiality, and textuality as a mode of responsible engagement with diaspora, its dominant narratives and deafening absences/silences. In this way, the text goes as wide as Mullen’s in its scale of reference, from (again) “Sappho’s  / tremble of tongue” (1989, 65) to Philomena’s raped and tongue-cut silence (98), to find its models of diaspora feminist meaning-making. In doing so, it reckons with the possibilities and dangers of making language and history “strange” and estranged from narrative: II. those who would inhabit the beyond of pale where the sacrilege of zero

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disputes the mathematic of heart erect shrines of stone to the common in us —anathema— touch tongue to tongue release the strange sandwiched between tongue and cheek and lip (79) From these troubling mathematics to the cautionary science of a mother refusing the baby who has been touched by “a stranger” (93), Philip merges the violent will to locate the “common in us” with contradictory and confrontational cultural modernist edicts to “Make it new” he said (71)10 She Tries Her Tongue does not refuse and oppose but rather finds in its repetitive sequencing a way “of encountering what is already encountered” (Ahmed 2000, 164) in a new order and positing a nearly endless number of orders to come. This is how critic Sara Ahmed defines the methodology of transnational feminism, even and especially when it rubs against the rules of colonial speech and human order—the facts of the body, singular versus the politics and ethics of relation and affiliation. Philip’s innovative text has only the power of accumulation of existing language11 and yet startles in its ability to render it, and its histories, strange and difficult in its occasions for connection. Far from a neutral play of language, Philip’s and Mullen’s works chart the wide and contradictory terrain of black women’s writing, the abundance and the potential for self-destruction that it takes as its tension, its materials, its test. Muse & Drudge and She Tries Her Tongue finally offer a series of “magical parts” as answers, with a sense that both sequence and reference are always already edited in an effort to define the boundaries of the popular, the representative, and the intellectual and disciplinary territory of diaspora studies.12 Harryette Mullen is instructive in this response, as she returns to the question of realist representation by asserting not fantasy but the pleasures of compiling and consuming language itself:

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just as I am I come knee bent and body bowed This here’s sorrow’s home My body’s southern song cram all you can into jelly jam preserve a feeling keep it sweet so beautiful it was presumptuous to alter the shape of my pleasure in doing or making proceed with abandon finding yourself where you are and who you’re playing for what stray companion (1995, 80) In this sense, the relationship between the quatrain and the collection approximates the one between the individual and the collective, and between diaspora and discipline; both enact the tension between representation and the act of reading—the tension laid out in this chapter and, finally, throughout Difficult Diasporas. Following Fanon’s critique of aesthetics which seek too hard to be politically representative, art “which has no internal rhythms, an art which is serene and immobile, evocative not of life but of death,” Mullen’s and Philip’s version of historical and cultural preservation is a casually mobile affair, dependent on the various contingencies of both unstable selves and others (2005, 225). In asking ourselves, “what is it impossible to think” through narrative? we might turn again to Gayatri Spivak, for another quandary on form and content, this time on the practices of postcolonial studies: “Can the subaltern speak?” she infamously asked of the field. No, and yet we try via rigorous methodological inquiry and context, she answers; we respond not by naming the subaltern but by describing our own context for asking a question about the particulars of this discourse around history (1993, 102). Spivak’s formal and contextual use of modes of failure is instructive for Mullen’s and Philip’s own critical success. Mullen and Philip locate themselves in the same conceptual and formal space that Spivak calls for and writes from, embodying what Brent Edwards

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identifies as the “paratactic,” or the style of writing in which sentences or images are placed together without conjunctions or, often, overt connection (2003b, 27). For Spivak, this essential disconnection in form reflects her ambivalence about and documentation of the difficulty of alliance across difference for subaltern subjects. The texts of Harryette Mullen and M. NourbeSe Philip share her suspicion at the level of political project but find in formal practice the possibility of, at the very least, proximity and, at best, a proximity that maintains a critical yet ludic sense of difference. In fact, it is the ludic as criticism.13 It is the impossibility of any smooth transition between discourses, the constantly contingent test of subjection, that keeps these authors’ texts, and readings of them, afloat, imagining impossible worlds beyond narration. My hope is that in mapping this accumulation of impossible objects of representation, I have also mapped alternative practices of writing, reading, and understanding diaspora that are both particular to twentieth-century diaspora women’s literary aesthetics and constructive for the project of interdisciplinary investigations of difference as a whole.

Coda: The Risks of Reading

We experience some sadness—though mixed with some more positive emotions—at the mere confrontation with the notion of African women and writing. Nothing really tragic, and nothing really worthy of jubilation either. Certainly however, there is no denying the pathos and wonder in being an African (and a woman) with sensibilities that are struggling ceaselessly to give expression to themselves in a language that is not just alien but was part of the colonizers’ weaponry. . . . There is pathos in writing about people, the majority of whom will never be in a position to enjoy you or judge you. And there is some wonder in not letting that or anything else stop you from writing. Indeed it is almost a miracle, in trying and succeeding somewhat to create in an aesthetic vacuum. For, from the little we learnt of one another’s backgrounds, none of us writers in our formative years was involved in any formal process, through which we could have systematically absorbed from our environment, the aesthetics that govern artistic production in general, and writing in particular. —ama ata aidoo, “To Be an African Woman Writer” We need to be alert to the occasions when racialized subjects not only step into the recognitions given to them by others but provide intuitions of a future in which relations of subjugation will (could) be transformed. . . . How do these intuitions of human possibility and complexity erupt into narrative acts? —hazel carby, “Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects”

Sylvia Wynter labels academics the “grammarians of our present epistemolocial order” (D. Scott 2000, 160), an ambivalent position at best that sees critical work as parsing out the rules of knowledge production around race, gender, and location. Ama Ata Aidoo articulates in the first epigraph a similarly unsettling aesthetic role for diaspora women’s writing and its complicated relationship to language, material production, and representation. She, too, hints at the difficulty, and the significance, of reading black women’s writing that has been the center of Difficult Diasporas’s inquiry. As a conclusion to the deep consideration of our

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critical reading practices around gender, race, and diaspora, I cite a location that has not yet been named in this book. When we think of our more everyday relationship to formally innovative black women’s literature, might we not just speak of opening up our scholarship, as Hazel Carby does in the second epigraph, but also our textual choices in the classroom? In 2003, in the very first course I taught on my own as a graduate student, I was foolish enough to assign Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. Enamored with the text, I felt as if I had to teach it, in many ways, because of its difficulty. But its difficulty also made me work hard—when planning the syllabus for this course for nonmajors, tasked with teaching the tenets of literary studies through a multigenre, multiperiod platform, I thought about the arc I had to trace to get my students to this text, leaving it for last. We looked at various poems throughout the course, talked about word play and form, drove home strategies of close reading structure and form at every turn, and built thematic discussions around how race, gender, and other social constructions of difference wound up being represented through literary form—much as I and most colleagues do now. And still, as the time approached, I was nervous. There was no plot for students to hide behind, no characters, no obvious or common referents to recognizable scripts of meaning, or meaning-making. Teaching Muse & Drudge was an act of sheer will, of performative terror (for myself as the teacher and for my students)—the kind of thing only a novice would attempt and would surely regret. Of course, I had a magic trick up my sleeve: Harryette Mullen was a faculty member and was so generous that she was willing to visit my early morning class to field questions from my students about Muse & Drudge. So I tasked each of my students with writing a question to ask Mullen, about the text and/or her writing process. This was a line of questioning that, of course, most of us do not get to experience and in general one that I deflect in the classroom—author biography and intention being tempting but limited scripts of interpretation that I do not want new students to fall back on while learning to critically read literature without research support. But in getting them to engage the text before they even stepped foot in the room with Mullen, I learned something that I still need to remind myself of: they will find a way in. A little confused, a little shy about their abilities, they still found a way to connect Mullen’s work to the eclectic body of texts that preceded it on the syllabus. And, as anyone who has ever met, read an interview with, or heard Mullen live can tell you, her straightforward, humorous, thoughtful, and open-ended

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responses to questions about her own work and African American literary tradition can only ever aid in, rather than close down, the interpretive process. The students articulated feeling challenged and then feeling a bit proud when they hit on something to ask about the text. Few—very few—chose to write their final papers on Mullen’s text. A few implored me never to teach it again. But, again, they had all found a way, however slight, into the difficult world of Muse & Drudge. I recount this unique experience at the close of this book about our critical research practices around diaspora to remind myself, as well as anyone still reading, of the continued invisibility of textual difficulty, especially black diaspora’s women’s literary innovations, in that other major venue for our profession, our teaching. All too often, I myself am guilty of leaving out the really strange texts from the syllabus, especially in lower-level and survey courses, seeing as they do not fit into the historical arc, or they are sure to be non-crowd-pleasers among most students. The formally innovative texts we do include (I am drawing a broad line here)—Toni Morrison’s Beloved in African American studies, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in postcolonial studies, for instance—tend to be postmodern novels that engage very legible historical events (the US chattel slave system and the partition of India and Pakistan, respectively), ones that the students are able to narratively pull through to make coherent the formal if still narrative strategies presented by these difficult forms. Mullen’s text refuses both the narrative and the historical as explanatory orders—there are few easy holds for those who are trying to climb into it, especially “novice” readers. And yet these introductory courses are the sole space where most of us encounter the story of African diaspora literature. As a scholar dedicated to this new archive but a teacher committed to transparency even while communicating the complexity of debates in the field, I frequently feel torn about these texts’ inclusion. And hence, they are frequently left out of my syllabi and syllabi around the US academy. But if we can remember that students, when “forced” to engage with difficulty, can and do find their way into the nuances of, for instance, debates about the meaning/purpose of the veil in transnational feminism or the stakes of respectability politics in black women’s literature in African American studies, could we also give students difficult creative forms and structures through which to read these thematic/ political/philosophical complexities? What I found in those questions from my largely first- and second-year non-English-major students was abstract, critical thinking, a frequently catch-all category of why liberal

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arts education is still a useful enterprise. But I did not even have to feed them the terms of the debate, deliver them the positions, and ask them to choose/bridge sides. They did the critical work of concatenation, excavation, and figuring the impossible simultaneously (albeit, and importantly, with some existing scaffolding on how one might read a text and a selection of methods on how cultural theorists before them have managed to read texts). These questions were perhaps failures in the sense of producing coherent expertise about a text such as Muse & Drudge, but they were certainly eruptive instances of exposing the order of things as an order, or making visible the narrative apparatuses in which we are usually asked to think, critically or otherwise. These texts themselves, in their innovative structures and forms, call us to new ways of reading and making meaning; they call us to “embrace the vulnerability and peril of the critical endeavor” (Hartman and Campt 2009, 23). In an essay titled “Notes on the Completion of Potentiality,” M. NourbeSe Philip narrates another scenario of diaspora feminist literacy, anticipating the critical opening of her own reading of She Tries Her Tongue when she responds to a student requesting that she read from the manuscript: “I will—if you read it with me” (1997, 126). Arguing for both reading and writing texts differently, Difficult Diasporas offers alternative ways of understanding and enacting interdisciplinarity itself as an impossible but necessary intellectual engagement. The texts of Difficult Diasporas enact this strategy as one of a collection of radical specificities, or the formal and conceptual tension between the exclusive and the inclusive—if we can recall Richards’s admission that she is “guilty of trying to include everything.” Risk surrounds the failure of interdisciplinary fields to master the dominant language of disciplinarity in its rush to include “everything,” thus diffusing the specificity of terms and experiences such as “feminism,” “black,” “transnational,” and “diaspora,” which can carry very material concerns of academic legitimacy and institutional organization, as well as critical “ownership” of politically created structures. If those structures expand or collapse, supposedly under the weight of accommodating “difference,” what becomes of that “traveling Jane” of black women as only relatively recent subjects of academic inquiry? The texts covered here take as their foundation “the impossibility of adequate description,” the critical failure of definition that is the necessary condition of interdisciplinarity. The “mutant taint” of language is just one, perhaps the most pervasive, of twentieth-century “tests” of purity that are constantly failing in their ability to accurately represent

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the range of race, gender, and location, just as attempts to categorize race in the nineteenth century also engage a mock-scientific “language of purity [that] is imprecise and impossible” (Brody 1998, 12). This constant movement between ludic and routine, particular and universal (the exceptional and/as the quotidian) within the same text, or even the same poetic line, retains the impossible as strategy—the inability to resolve the tensions of the imaginary and the material that is the innovative essence of Audre Lorde’s call that “poetry is not a luxury” (2012). To invert Daniel Cross Turner’s comment on Harryette Mullen’s aesthetic and ethical process, there is “madness” in their “methods,” as there necessarily is in the very structures of diaspora circulation, with its compromised visions of choice, labor, community, and home (2004, 316). This disordered and disordering method is one of mobile literacies, the welcoming critical act of “I will—if you read it with me” that is also the welcoming of failure, of the incomplete projects that one can only put in proximity to others as a sort of commiseration and collaboration at one time. Facing the “conflict of choices” that founding black feminist critics such as Barbara Christian (2007) identify as the academic problem of the black woman as subject, Kay, Hurston, Brodber, Kennedy, Aidoo, Wicomb, Head, Melville, Alexander, Philip, Mullen, and Richards argue that the innovative practice of language, textual and spoken, finds its lyric mirror in diaspora. Its diffuse series of relations is a means to recognize the surprising or difficult use of existing structures of meaning—grammar on the one hand and model of national belonging on the other. Innovative linguistic practice, however, is read as false, inauthentic, unreal, and inorganic. It is everything that the discourse about black women in hegemonic and resistant discourses is not, subjectively speaking. The paratactic juncture of form and subject, then, interpolates and interprets the two—grammar and black women’s subjectification are both used, replayed, played out, recycled, preowned, colonized, and so on (Frost 2000, 406). These literacies perform interdisciplinarity as the drama of impossibility—the conflicted interaction between rooms and trains, the world and the jar, possessor and possessed, bottom and top, muse and drudge. In other words, both sets of subjects are processed and are a process of constantly produced “wayward” meanings from the constructed “originals.” To speak of such nomadic paths for diasporic meaning—as opposed to something more directed or patterned, such as migrancy or even a poetic form such as elegy—is not, however, to abandon it to an unchecked capaciousness.1 On the contrary, this formal play and exuberance has at its core a sense of what Spivak calls “responsibility” (1999, 3).2

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The texts of Difficult Diasporas perform, in their sequence and order, a mode of reading these disciplinary practices that also engages in the kind of “unevenness” that Arjun Appadurai sees as constitutive of the modern moment, emphasizing the role of intellectual “imagination” as an active agent, one that engages with and in its own failure to produce the “realities” it conjures (1996, 31). Difficult Diasporas insists, repeatedly, that purity as critical object or practice is an impossibility—especially in the inevitable hybridity of language, which constantly undermines the Enlightenment desire to name, discover, classify, and separate, as well as the revolutionary desire for opposition and resistance: speaking truth to power. The economy of these texts’ aesthetics brings us to a language that breaks our reading habits, breaks the language we ascribe not just to identitarian politics but to the ways that we, as critics, have chosen to telegraph categories of difference and their interventions. Not just at the level of content but at the level of form, these innovative projects challenge us, through their articulation and performance of the fundamental misunderstanding between subjects. This incommensurability is an expression of that conflict between desire and material risk that this book attempts to describe as the innovative terrain of diaspora feminist literacy. This return to the particular creates space for more sweeping gestures, for a collection that tells a more surprising story, an unexpected history of the field, one that requires the poetic leaps, the “close reading” demands that the lyric places on its reader. That kind of exchange is what I hope Difficult Diasporas moves toward as well, in its conception and practice of diaspora as the distinct territory of feminist critical and cultural practice. But can we “hip signal” that out in our own critical writing and pedagogy, not to mention the histories and structures of interdisciplinarity, the “strange affinities” of work around difference?3 Rather than prescriptive futures, I argue, an investment in the possibilities of relational, temporary, and innovative flows can complement the failures of formal definition. A “stray companion,” this project argues, is far more appealing than the fidelity of isolated and isolating critical practice (Mullen 1995, 80)—letting the other “find” you, even as “you keep looking,” together (ibid.; Philip 1989, 30). And, of course, I do not just mean this as a call for literary survey classes. Difficult Diasporas is a call to the interdisciplines, particularly ethnic, American, area, and gender studies, to rethink what and how we are teaching our fields to our students. Even as we claim intersectionality, are we teaching, perhaps, Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation” in

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feminist theory? Or Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” in our African diaspora studies course? As Mohanty imagines cultivating a “culture of dissent” in our institutional lives, I might suggest a pedagogical culture of difficulty (2003, 216). If we are doing research in multidisciplinary, recombinant ways that reflect our breadth of influence, can we not be transparent enough with our students to imagine our way out of strict discipline-like subjects, objects, and methods of study? Beyond critical theory, as well, I hope that Difficult Diasporas can perhaps recenter the significance of studying literature and other creative expression not just as evidence of the historical and philosophical apparatuses around it but as sites of theorizing, sites of method itself. Literature can offer far more than recognizable, mimetic worlds that tell a story just beyond our reach but within our given understanding of time, place, and politics. Cultural form shapes how we receive and imagine meaning in the world, and, put simply, different forms can create different knowledges, innovations in the order of even progressive thought. Cultural form can give us the tools, as scholar Kandice Chuh (2003) puts it, to “imagine otherwise,” to imagine possibilities that lie beyond the narrative structures that contain not just the failed world that is but also our ability to conceive of what change can and should be. This is because literature can offer more than representation—it offers new modes and nodes of thought itself, at its best. Humbly, Difficult Diasporas points toward this potential of difficulty in diaspora studies and beyond, in our research and in our classrooms. On these questions of difficulty, responsibility, and impossibility, Philip’s other conditional is instructive: If not If not If Not If not in yours In whose . . . In whose language Am I If not in yours Beautiful (1989, 52–53) We can take as our responsibility an imperative to introduce aesthetic difficulty and the difficulty of reading categories of race, gender, and geography into our scholarship and into our classrooms. We can do this via primary texts that expand recognizable representations and

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representational narratives—finding in them significant new routes to interdisciplinary thought. Here, “I will—If you read with me” is given new life in the forms of pedagogy (syllabi, anthologies, etc.). Literature is then not the bounded field that can only represent the material but becomes the material itself for imagining the infinitely deferred “justice” that has too long looked like and for a recognizable script of difference. Difficult Diasporas offers up an archive of literacies that assume that, in our classrooms and in our scholarship, we can use aesthetic form to disorder our stories of difference.

Notes

Introduction 1. Part of the language poetry school, Hunt engages a decidedly different generic template, that of a late twentieth-century, white-identified school of poetics which eschews direct reference to identity or even concrete, accessible subjects for experiments with the abstraction of language. Hunt and a growing handful of critics have taken on experimental poetics as a means of reordering race and gender as categories that shape and are shaped by language itself, as is discussed later in the introduction. See also Cummings (2005) on Hunt, aesthetics, and race. This discussion of a “New Black Aesthetic” (usually referring to fiction and music) is also infamously taken up by novelist Trey Ellis in his piece of the same name (1989), which attempts to open up space for black popular and literary culture to navigate outside of expected content and form (see also Lott 1989; Favor 1993). 2. For example, see condemnations of Phillis Wheatley in the Black Arts era by Amiri Baraka in Blues People ([1963] 2002), among others, or the invisibility of formally innovative black poets’ work to black audiences if it does not directly reference race, such as Harryette Mullen’s second and third collections of poetry, before Muse & Drudge. See Mix (2005), Frost (1995). 3. This move mirrors Foucault’s take in The Order of Things itself, which is also the title of a Lucretius verse (“On the Order of Things,” also translated as “On the Nature of Things,” 50 BC) that focuses on the materiality of the natural world (which Foucault brings back to a structuralist critique of form, in his way). See also Jonathan Goldberg’s The Seeds of Things (2009), which takes off on both Lucretius and Foucault in rethinking the materiality of the body and sexuality in Western history. While I do not claim to be a materialist, I do want to think of studying the text as a more materialist endeavor than aesthetic theory might suggest, something that gets to the texture of difference, continuity, and the experience of diaspora through the innovative rendering of language, genre, and form.

210 / notes 4. Jacques Rancière makes the argument that aesthetics “can be understood . . . as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. . . . Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (2006, 13). 5. As scholars such as Farah Jasmine Griffin (1995) have also done. 6. As Carrie Noland and Barrett Watten argue in the introduction to their 2009 edited collection, “‘Avant-garde’ and ‘diaspora,’ then both lend themselves to conceptual as well as historical categories. In their adjectival forms, ‘avant-garde’ and ‘diasporic’ characterize moments belonging to a wide range of cultural trajectories (types of displacement imposed by oppressive force) and cultural logic (ways of understanding the relation between artistic practice and these forces)” (2). 7. In African American studies, Claudia Tate (1998) refers to this textual phenomenon as “racial protocol” and relates it not just to realism but to models of “protest.” Ann duCille articulates this in what she terms the “bourgeois blues” (1993a, 421), which remains skeptical of “the utopian trend in contemporary cultural criticism that readily reads resistance in such privileged, so-called authentically black discourses as the classic blues of the nineteen-twenties, while denigrating other cultural forms for their perceived adherence to and promotion of traditional (white) values” (421). She continues: “Middle-class, when applied to black artists and their subjects, becomes a pejorative, a sign of having mortgaged one’s black aesthetic to the alien conventions of the dominant culture” (423). Similarly, form and genre have not always taken center stage in negotiating transnational feminist studies, where an emphasis on realism, however informed by Mohanty’s blistering critique of Third World women’s representation (1984), has stood as the quotidian methodology of reading across axes of power. This difficulty in recognizing what’s “black” or “feminist” enough for anthologies, courses, and the canon has displaced many contemporary women writers’ work but has also given rise to counterdiscourses and narratives which trouble the lines between authenticity and racial categories, as well as race and poetic form, in African American and Anglophone African diaspora studies. 8. For more on reading and (postcolonial) ethics, see Spivak (1999), Sanders (1999), Nuttall (2001), Guillory (2000), Parikh (2009), and Morrison (1993). Sanders, in particular, thinks through reading as an “inventi[ve]” practice, in debt to Spivak’s work, as does Constance Richards, who calls for reading as a transnational feminist practice of “invention” (2000, 35). Terrance Hayes opens a forum discussion on experimental African American poetry by citing his interest in questioning “‘the inventors’ about their ‘inventions’” in response to the encounter with innovative writing (Hayes and Shockley 2009, 115). But as Douglas Kearney also helpfully points out later in the forum, we also want to keep from claiming any identitarian hold on innovation as the property of (racial) difference, intrinsically (126), a claim that helps move us away from the author function and individual writerly agency and toward what Zoë Wicomb powerfully calls for as “literacy,” defined as an ability to critically read and decode the kind of structures around reading that limit a text’s interpretation based on race, gender, nationality, and location (1993, 32). 9. From Claudia Tate (1998) to Deborah McDowell (1995) to Florence Stratton (1994) to Edouard Glissant (1989) to Gayatri Spivak (1999) to Simon Gikandi (2005),

notes / 211 critics across the spectrum of black and transnational feminist studies have called for, in effect, a (re)turn to studying form. Theorist and critic Houston Baker argues boldly in his 1987 “Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance” for an equivalent “difficulty” for African American texts often excluded from mainstream definitions of literary modernism (in Baker’s 2001 Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism, Re-reading Booker T., he complicates his earlier stance in suggesting the limits of black modernism, both as a reading practice and as a politically useful construction). Recent work on postmodern experimental writing, such as the introduction to We Who Love to Be Astonished (Hinton, Hogue, and DuPlessis 2002) and Lyric Interventions (Kinnahan 2004), pursues difficulty as a particular strategy for a feminist “oppositional poetics,” one that has the capacity to confound, “bewilder,” and pleasurably “astonish” in not just its textual form but its exploration of complex and often contradictory forces of gender, race, nation, class, and sexuality. So difficulty also suggests a model based on reading heterogeneity and difference. 10. This call to relationality speaks through transnational feminist scholarship, too, be it in the colonial context of “intimate, reciprocal, and contradictory relations” (McClintock 1995, 5) or the more utopic call for a feminist practice that figures “a different order of relationship among people” (Alexander and Mohanty 1997, xxviii). The turn to the transnational and the turn to diaspora each reflect these affective modes of relationality, as when Yogita Goyal (2010a) argues that the narratives of diaspora itself assert relation and perform erasure at the same time (in terms of Africa, in her argument), a structure of feeling that Michelle Stephens ascribes to a “diasporic, affective sense of belonging, longing for both integration and mobility within the worldsystem” (2005, 16) and that Miranda Joseph argues is the “dialectic of complicity and resistance” that constitutes any community’s relationship to the modern global state (2002, xxv). There are aesthetic and generic dimensions to this complex community formation as well, where “the style by which” affiliations “are imagined,” as Stuart Hall frames it, “produced the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” in Benedict Anderson’s formulation of practices of hailing and belonging (2003, 244, 245). 11. This is also Gayatri Spivak’s cue in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012) to wrest for literary aesthetics a more relevant stake in discussions of race, gender, and diaspora—here, one that engages tactics beyond narration to find significant space alongside the nation-state in teaching us how to imagine and to read these institutions and their representational strategies differently. 12. See Brent Edwards, “Postcolonial Traces” (2004), in which he outlines the dearth of critical evaluation of postcolonial poetry in particular and the overvaluation of the novel. There is, of course, dissent within the ranks of Anglophone literary studies on this formal bias. Often these debates take the form of class arguments and their relationships to and representations in language (vernacular in the African American context, Patois and Creole in the Caribbean as well as in the Black British context, the use of English in African literature, the valuation of orality in all four contexts). 13. In other words, women’s routes in the diaspora may not be best represented through the novel form. Materially, women are less likely to have time or access to either the travel or routes of publication that the production of diaspora novels entails, nor would those conditions or genres necessarily be their ideal routes to subjectivity. This also applies to the notoriously limited access women in general, and especially

212 / notes those outside the film-industry hubs, have to the resources required to make a featurelength narrative film. 14. See H. White (2003), Hitchcock (2003), Derrida (1980) on genre. 15. See, e.g., DeLoughrey (1998), Dubey (1998), Gunning (2001), and Chrisman (1997) for critiques of Gilroy on his inattention to gender politics to his Atlantic bias (as well as a number of books written in Gilroy’s wake, including B. Edwards (2003a), Stephens (2005), J. Brown (2008), and Goyal 2010a). 16. These writers were rediscovered thanks to the tireless work of Barbara Christian (2007), Cheryl Wall (2005), Wall, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar (1995), Deborah McDowell (1995), Nellie McKay (1997), Gloria Hull (1987), Hull et al. (1982), Mae Henderson (1993), Mary Helen Washington (1977, 1990), Ann duCille (1993b, 1996), and Claudia Tate (1998), to name a few of the black feminist theorists who relocated black women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to prominence, in the academy and beyond, as well as Houston Baker ([1984] 1987) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988–1991]). In locating a new “tradition” of black women writers, they paved the way for the genealogy of formally innovative writers I trace in this book. 17. See here the critiques levied by Elizabeth DeLoughrey (1998) on gendering the Middle Passage and unpacking the division of the domestic and the public that Trixie Smith blueprints in “Freight Train Blues,” or the more recent work of Michelle Stephens, who takes on the masculinist underpinnings of diaspora thought in Black Empire. Gilroy is interested in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) for the way it expresses what he labels the ineffability of the loss and the trauma of slavery—a characteristic of the Black Atlantic’s diaspora experience that defines it. Following Gay Wilentz, we might suggest that women’s writing, though, always exceeded the frames of nation and empire and that women’s vantage point necessarily went beyond the migration template and toward cultural exchange and its ambivalences and significances. Gilroy also engages gender and sexuality in his chapter on contemporary black music in Against Race, “After the Love Is Gone” (2000). 18. See Mohanty (1984), McClintock (1995), Sharpe (1993, 2003), Nnaemeka (1997), Loomba (2005), Loomba and Lukose (2012), Grewal (2005), Grewal and Kaplan (1994), Kaplan (1996), Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem (1999), Ray (2000), and Narayan (1997). 19. See, e.g., Mikell (1997), Cole, Manuh, and Miescher (2007), Ogundipe-Leslie (1994), Oyewumi (1997, 2005, 2011), Davies (1994), Davies and Graves (1986), Davies and Ogundipe-Leslie (1995), Wilson-Tagoe (1998), Stratton (1994). 20. This struggle for inclusion and expansion of the subjects and objects of study within these interdisciplines is not always so easily articulated in terms of critical practice, as it also appears in debates around the renaming of programs, centers, and departments: Africana/African-American/Afro-American/Black/Africana/African and African diaspora studies and feminist/fender/gender and sexuality/women’s and gender/women’s studies. These shifts, in their attempt to exhaustively name their objects of study, exhibit a desire to name and to correct the fissures and failures of curricular negotiations of difference in expanding fields of inquiry. This anxiety over ordering proper objects of study through these names and through curricular shifts (think Introduction to the Black Diaspora instead of Introduction to African American Studies or a new core major requirement on Women of Color Feminism) hinges

notes / 213 on more expansive notions of race, gender, sexuality, and transnational identification, promising both that change has come into these institutional forms and that they are capacious enough to accommodate both the “new” and the “old” objects in a single rubric. In critic Rachel Lee’s terms regarding women’s and gender studies, “Women of color thus serve Women’s Studies in multiple fashions: as the idea of a triumphal end point and as a resented (envied) lost object that has wrested from Women’s Studies its own phantom mobility” (2002, 95). In other words, we should not take dialogues of inclusion as success, even internally, but as continued difficult terrains that African diaspora and transnational feminist studies chart for their “home” interdisciplines, for each other, and for the university. 21. It would be impossible to fully document even the recent critical definitions and revisions of “diaspora” as a term, but I will recount some here, as echoed in the preceding paragraph in the text. Gilroy finds use in the term as a move away from cultural and racial essentialism and toward “the best modes of politicized postmodernism which shares an interest in understanding the self as contingently and performatively produced” (2000, 23–24), as does Stuart Hall (1996), who is a bit kinder to other models of “identity” and their uses but nonetheless finds the emphasis on dynamic shifts and hybridity in diaspora to be a more generative site of black cultural studies (as does Tölölyan 1996). Brent Edwards (2001) follows this logic as a historical shift away from Pan-Africanism in the post African Independence world toward difference itself. Outside of the strictly African Diaspora, James Clifford (1997), conversely, sees in diaspora a potential replacement for the contentious “post-” in postcolonial, opening out to a less historically bounded reading of colonialism itself. Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin (2002) suggest that diaspora offers a model of cultural power, as opposed to the power of the state (in a broad definition of diaspora) as it is traced through historiographic practice. Avtar Brah, on the other hand, sees the historical “situatedness” of diaspora as the crux of its formation, while still centering on the constructed “confluence of narratives” that form “the crucible of the materiality of everyday life” (1996, 183). Not surprisingly, feminist critics have followed Brah in critiquing some of the diaspora formations just mentioned: Joan Dayan (1996) argues that invocations of “hybridity” empty out the historical violence of slavery and its continued aftermath (Clifford also briefly worries if diaspora is a usurpment of “minority discourse” as such; 1997, 255); Michelle Stephens (2005) points to some of the discourses of Empire that the masculinist underpinnings of diaspora thought assert in opposition to the national state. Instead of a utopic, “ethical” concept (R. Walcott 2003, 123), Maryse Condé (2002) has perhaps the bluntest vision of “translation” in the diaspora as it is constituted via performative difference, one that questions the whole critical enterprise and at the same time confirms its very human, practical scale. Speaking about the “Caribbean region,” she suggests that the New World of diaspora is “like a stage on which actors in an assortment of costumes, speaking different tongues and consequently incapable of communicating, enter, exit, cross each other’s paths, come face to face and often clash, uttering discourses intelligible to their ears alone” (212). This messy, sometimes unintentional, sometimes violent, often solipsistic, and occasionally transcendent version of diaspora is the one I like to think of as the feminist blueprint for the texts in Difficult Diasporas—one that comes out of a recognition of both the lack of power and the pleasures of contact simultaneously. Diaspora becomes the product of both mapped and more improvisational encounters here.

214 / notes 22. As Lauren Berlant provocatively argues about the genre of the archive, “But too often we derive a sense of a time, place, and power through historical archives whose job it is to explain something aesthetic without thinking the aesthetic in the sensually affective terms that conventions of entextualizing always code, perform, and release” (2011, 67). Here, I argue that a critical focus on literary aesthetics might also move our scholarship around race, gender, and diaspora to new sites, away from the mandate of historical realism that is and has been incredibly important to diaspora studies but need not be the dominant intellectual frame for interdisciplinary thought or progressive politics. 23. Elizabeth DeLoughrey (1998) suggests this in her early critique of The Black Atlantic. 24. The stakes of representation have been a central debate in black feminist criticism. This is a response to a body of scholarship on “respectability” that sought to recover black women’s writing from its supposed silences surrounding sexuality. (See also regarding African women’s representation Busia 1989, Nnaemeka 1997). This discourse represents an interrogation into traditional readings of black women’s sexuality. Evelyn Hammonds, in her foundational article “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence” (1997), lays out in her title what she sees as the primary conflict: “silence.” Yet within the article’s text, she seems to recognize that “problematic” itself as a complicated and inconsistent one: “It [black women’s sexuality] is rendered simultaneously invisible, visible (exposed), hypervisible, and pathologized in dominant discourses” (1997, 170). Hammonds then turns to the subject of whose “silence” she is speaking of—middle-class black women. In particular, “Black feminist theorists . . . have drawn upon a specific historical narrative which purportedly describes the factors that have produced and maintained perceptions of black women’s sexuality (including their own). Three themes emerge in this history: first, the construction of the black female as the embodiment of sex and the attendant invisibility of black women as the unvoiced, unseen—everything that is not white; secondly, the resistance of black women both to negative stereotypes of their sexuality and to the material effects of those stereotypes on black women’s lives; and, finally, the evolution of a ‘culture of dissemblance’ and a ‘politics of silence’ by black women on the issue of their sexuality” (1997, 171). While the term “black feminist theorists” does not, inevitably, have to equal “middle class,” the underlying class of women she speaks of is educated, literate in multiple forms of black culture, and textually concerned with opposing or upholding certain historical narratives of black women’s bodies and sexuality (E. White 2001). Constructed as a group of women invested in the academy who have stock in “the politics of respectability,” black feminist critics seem to have the dual job of both tracing a particular and positive trajectory of black women for their race and contesting their own presence and absence on the scene of various academic and canonical histories. This class issue emerges within transnational feminist theory, as well, such as in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak 1993) and “Under Western Eyes” (Mohanty 1984). As scholar Uma Narayan succinctly puts it, education and mobility make Third World women no less “outside,” as these elements have “meshed” with whatever is assumed to be a separate and wholly different culture (1997, 32–33); she points out the fallacy in assuming that “real” Third World women only exist outside of cultural shifts. 25. This impulse aligns with one that women’s studies has been facing since 1990, a crisis in its “proper object” of study that, as Robin Wiegman characterizes it, “raises

notes / 215 questions about the desire for representation that has motivated many of the debates about women and forwards the notion that the political work of identity-based studies is representation via the nomination of the object itself” (Wiegman 2011, 11; Wiegman 2000; Butler 1994). It is this relationality that I seek to explore in its investment in the plotting and timing of difference, constituted through cultural form and its circulation through/as discourse. 26. To borrow Aldon Nielsen’s words on black postmodernism, these contested boundaries are filled with the “all too common assumption that experimental approaches to expression and theorized reading are somehow white things” (1997, 13). This stance is usually ascribed to a Black Arts–era “Black Aesthetic” which argues for the existence of and insistence on racialized aesthetic practice that, while allowing for sometimes innovative form, conscripted the content and conclusions of black art under the rubric of “politics” (Neal 1968, Gayle 1971, Baraka 1971), if not realism (Baraka can hardly be considered a realist, of course). The twentieth-century rise in the canonization of black literature post–Civil Rights and Independence, particularly the solidification of “vernacular” theory in the nineteen-eighties, has sometimes obfuscated or marginalized certain writers’ inventive texts, while championing others (mostly men’s). The texts here strive toward the unfamiliarity of modernism at their least innovative and frequently toward the nonnarrative and “postmodern” aesthetics (Dubey 2003). Attention to aesthetic difference, however, is not alien to popular black culture—it is, as Zora Neale Hurston characterizes it, the “will to adorn” in the face of the social ([1934] 2000, 32), or as Léopold Senghor challenged us to think, “the art of the European West had always been based on realism” ([1966] 1994, 32). As such, an ethical imperative is implicated to question formulations of tradition even within black studies. Thérèse Migraine-George (2008), Ezekiel Mphahlele (1972, 1974), Lewis Nkosi (1981, 1998), Anthony Appiah (1991), Olakunle George (2003), Ato Quayson (2000), Johnson et al. (1982), Wole Soyinka (1976), Tejumola Olaniyan (2003), Zine Magubane (2003), Kenneth Harrow (1993b, 2007), Abiola Irele (2001), and several other African studies critics have also discussed this seeming split between aesthetics and black/African/postcolonial politics and the conflict between “new and old modes—cultural and economic, the one not entirely autonomous, the other not all determinative—and of the interests vested therein” (Foster 1983, xi). Ato Quayson (2000) argues in particular for the valuable tension in thinking these divides with and through feminism. See also Shockley (2011), Mackey (1993), Mullen (1996, 2012), Brody (2008), L. Thomas (2000), Nuttall (2006), Noland and Watten (2009), Carby (2009), hooks (1994), H. Baker ([1987] 1999), Baker, Alexander, and Redmond (1991), J. Brown (2008), and Glissant (1989). 27. The difficulties/tensions, as well as significance, of finding pleasure and beauty in African and African diaspora studies are outlined in Sarah Nuttall’s historical tracing of Africa’s relationship to ideals of beauty in Beautiful/Ugly (2006). 28. As my first chapter argues, this route around gendered paradigms is decidedly queer, disarticulating the “reproduction”—both literal and conceptual—of race through an ontologically recognizable rationale, be it feminist/antiracist or not. 29. This is not to say that great work has not been and does not continue to be done on realist texts in feminism or the postmodern novel in African American studies, which I largely avoid here (with the exception of Brodber’s text). See, e.g., Andrade (2011), Dubey (2003), and Goyal (2010a).

216 / notes 30. Harris tellingly associates such “illiteracy” with the exclusive championing of social realism. As Harryette Mullen adds in her work on African writing and the enforcement of strict histories of its oral tradition, “the trope of orality, to the exclusion of more writerly texts, will cost us some impoverishment of the tradition” (1996, 670). For more on questions of literacy, orality, and publishing, see Irele (2001), Dubey (2003), Wicomb (1993). 31. Breaking out of what Harris identifies as the “submit or rebel” dialectic (1999, 84), innovation—with its emphasis on difference within a system of too-familiar signs—is the base of the mobile literacies I propose, as labor that refuses to begin and end with social realism. Despite the twenty-five years since Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey (1988), whose enormous contribution to African American studies was to suggest the aesthetic and formal ways of knowing embedded in black cultural expression, those formal inquires have stagnated in critical literature. 32. Critic Simon Frith argues that identity itself is “a matter of both ethics and aesthetics” (1996, 109) that, for him, relates to listening to music but could also be attached to my earlier argument about the ethics of reading. It is worth noting that he defines aesthetics as the way we “experience ourselves (not just the world) in a different way” (109), foregrounding an encounter with difference itself as the very definition of the aesthetic. 33. I continue in the footsteps of other diaspora scholars in seeking transnational answers to African American studies’ initial nationalistic questions, here positioning diaspora as an intervention in the orders of representation that we have invested in as constitutive of race. And the blues, as they foreground movement, (im)mobility, and transit as well as provide these for their performing subjects and circulating objects (songs), certainly open up to diasporic routes, as does Hunt’s (1990) invocation of the power of language in defining—and potentially redefining—historically and culturally bound processes of identification. Both genres have found small but powerful critical voices in the academy that seek to undo obvious links between race, gender, and the use of poetic language. 34. This follows the work of a small but significant group of scholars in recent years, from the groundbreaking work of Davies (1994) and Wilentz (1992), across genres to introduce us to major African diaspora women’s authors (and including Davies’s important editorial work as well), to the work of Goyal (2010a), Wilks (2008), H. Young (2006), J. Brown (2008), Puri (2004), Campt (2004), Hartman and Campt (2009), Wright (2004), and Stephens (2005) on the novel and other forms across diaspora lines, to those who expand geographically beyond the bounds of the Black Atlantic Triangle, such as Donaldson (1992) and DeLoughrey (2007b). 35. The important diaspora feminist work of Jenny Sharpe (2003) and Sandra Gunning (2001) on nineteenth-century African American and Caribbean women’s texts and textuality comes before me, as does Anne McClintock’s (1995) complex work on racial formation and class difference in South Africa. These texts, among others, are foundational for thinking through aesthetics and genre as major fronts of feminist inquiry into race, gender, and nation. 36. See note 19 on African feminism in particular for sources that articulate of the bind placed on African women between “feminism” and nationalism/anticolonialism. 37. This follows the methodologies of immanent critique that emerged in the eighties, the nineties, and the first decade of the new millennium, from Butler to Spivak.

notes / 217 38. As Stuart Hall effectively reminds us, “Its [difference’s] complexity exceeds this binary structure of representation. . . . Without relations of difference, no representation could occur. But what is then constituted with representation is always open to being deferred, staggered, serialized” (2003, 238–39). See also Roderick Ferguson’s The Reorder of Things (2012) on the institutionalization of minority discourse/rhetorics of difference. 39. One could claim others in this community: Thylia Moss, Claudia Rankine, Toni Morrison, Patience Agbabi, Suzan Lori-Parks, Dionne Brand, Ntozake Shange, Octavia Butler, Bernardine Evaristo, Renee Gladman, for example. 40. Nathaniel Mackey echoes this sentiment when he argues that formally innovative black authors “tell their stories by calling such contentions into question. . . . [They] sought new ways to show us not only what we don’t see but that we don’t see, the constructs by which we are both blinded and enlightened” (1993, 19). This idea of the possibilities of that which is unknown, or cannot be known, has been invoked of late in feminist scholarship as well: see Grosz (2002) and J. Scott (2012). 41. See Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (2011), for an academic treatise on the progressive critical value of failure. 42. Here, I reference Miranda Joseph’s (2002) trenchant critique of the politics and invocations of “community,” particularly in progressive/Left scholarship.

1 / The World and the “Jar” 1. In the case of diaspora studies’ work on Harlem, the site’s significance was both the springboard for and the problem of making black diasporic connections more visible and complicated within African American studies. For black feminist criticism, the Harlem Renaissance was a fruitful site for the recovery of earlier black women’s texts and contributions to black literary and intellectual tradition, a move to substantiate critical and commercial acclaim for post–Civil Rights black women writers. Of course, other critics have dislocated Harlem, too, for a black Paris of the twenties and thirties and beyond. See Archer-Straw, Negrophilia (2001); Shack, Harlem in Montmartre (2001); Jules-Rosette, Black Paris (2000); Stovall, Paris Noir (1996); and the foundational Fabre, From Harlem to Paris (1991). As many of these critics, as well as Josephine Baker scholars, have noted, a French/European model of racial exotification is also one that relegates blackness to a dislocated “fantasy” of race—a timeless, primitivist “African” aesthetic. 2. The Harlem Renaissance went out of favor in the sixties and seventies during the Black Arts movement, as it largely embraced more didactic political and “separatist” aesthetics. Of course, individual authors and in particular black women writers at the margins of the movement, such as Audre Lorde, broke ranks with a dismissal of Harlem Renaissance literature as assimilationist. 3. The term is from Abby Arthur Johnson’s 1978 article “Literary Midwife: Jessie Redmon Fauset and the Harlem Renaissance.” Black feminist critics such as Deborah McDowell (1995) later critique this reading of Fauset’s work as an editor and author. 4. Two sets of criticism in the past twenty years have addressed this complex dynamic between the simultaneous presence and absence of black women’s various aesthetic performances: black feminist literary criticism has worked hard on the project of recovery, finding lost and forgotten Harlem Renaissance texts by women authors and meaningfully attempting to incorporate them into the canon and critical legacy

218 / notes of the Harlem Renaissance phenomenon. As a subset of this body of work, critics such as Angela Davis and Hazel Carby have also sought to take seriously the intellectual work and legacies of blueswomen performers. While sometimes pitched as additions and celebrations, this significant body of work has undoubtedly changed the landscape of what (and who) it is possible to study, literally, in the Harlem Renaissance. Cheryl Wall (2005), Deborah McDowell (1995), Claudia Tate (1998), and Hazel Carby (1987, 1999) are probably the most well known, though there are many, many more who could be cited. While Carby works on Black British literature and culture, she does not usually combine regions within the bounds of a single article or chapter. It is interesting, though, to think of Cultures in Babylon (1999), in which British- and Americancentered essays are collected, as a diaspora critique within in its own textual borders. 5. We should not perhaps see the simultaneous movements as coincidental. Like Brent Edwards’s inquiry (2003a) into whether emerging public feminist discourses are constitutive of the rise in internationalist thought and organizing, we should think about how feminist theory acts as one of the critical forces compelling postcolonial studies into a field and how the serious consideration of women as subjects, even in a representational frame, necessarily shifts the ground on which we consider field formation and constitution. Challenging national boundaries in critical fields and disciplines, then, could be considered a product of incorporating difference into methodological practice. 6. Daphne Brooks’s Bodies of Dissent (2006) stands as another recent critical turn that attempts to consider black performance, both idiosyncratic and exploited, as political thought/intellectual work. 7. Patrick Williams’s provocative essay “Significant Corporeality” (2005), on Kay’s Trumpet, suggests that in that text, as well, Kay both exposes the performative aspects of gender and sexuality (and to a lesser degree race) and insists on an authentic experience of the body. In other words, Kay has it “both ways” when it comes to deconstructing identity. 8. Kay’s Scottish identification particularly shows in her poetry, as many critics have discussed, but also in her 1998 novel, Trumpet, and her 2010 memoir on tracking down her birth parents, Red Dust Road. See Clandfield (2002), C. Jones (2004), Sandten (2008), Burkitt (2010), Fong (2011). 9. See Yogita Goyal, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010), in which Goyal suggestively theorizes romance as the genre of diaspora and realism as that of the nation in twentieth-century Black Atlantic fiction. 10. Alan Rice discusses this in other works by Jackie Kay in his 2003 essay “Heroes across the Sea.” 11. Kay talks about her relationship to Bessie Smith as one in which the singer became a part of her family, in a sense (Jaggi and Dyer 1999, 55). 12. I use “queer” here in the political sense, as same-sex desire which alters heteronormative standards, as well as in a more suggestive theoretical sense. “Queer diaspora” has the potential to disrupt the expected flows of knowledge and culture in both stated fields of study, as Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley lays out in her GLQ article “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic” (2008). 13. This sentiment is mimicked, albeit in a more traditional “diaspora story,” in Kay’s short story “Out of Hand” (in her 2003 collection of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking), in which the protagonist reflects on nearly fifty years of living in the

notes / 219 United Kingdom after emigrating from the Caribbean. The narrative enforces a dissociation with the racism the protagonist experiences that corresponds to her ability to continue her day-to-day life in the United Kingdom. 14. This emphasis on the possibilities of the everyday resonates with Bruce Robbins’s theorization of a new internationalism where “global culture is ordinary” in scale, rather than only existing on a massive economic-political plane of time and space (1999, 16). 15. In a perversion of Homi Bhabha’s analysis of postcolonial subjectivity, the mimicry of blackness becomes “almost the same but not black” for Kay, an approximation and hyperidentification with the signs and codes of black identity that she cannot readily access due to her location (Bhabha 2006). 16. The major focus of Kay criticism is on queer readings of her novel Trumpet (1998), centered on a transgendered blues figure dislocated to rural Scotland. For instance, Irene Rose, in “Heralding New Possibilities” (2003), focuses on Kay’s restaging of Judith Halberstam’s “female masculinity,” rather than the category of “lesbian,” to rethink performative identity and self-fashioning in Kay’s work; Alice Walker, in “As You Wear” (2007), thinks through the stakes of cross-dressing and gender binaries; Patrick Williams, in the aforementioned “Contingent Corporeality” (2005), suggests that bodies themselves are rendered flexible in Kay’s fiction. 17. Thinking about “transformation” within a more continuous pattern is one method of analyzing difference without necessarily fetishizing it as the only productive category in identity-based scholarship. For a compelling discussion of continuity in the context of women’s studies, see Judith M. Bennett’s “Confronting Continuity” (1997); Joanne Winning’s discussion of Kay’s work (“Curious Rarities?,” 2000), in particular her poetry’s relationship to theories of “home,” also touches on the relationship between the foreign and the familiar in Kay’s work. 18. Arjun Appadurai (1996) thinks of cultural flows across diaspora as productive of collective “social imagination,” which certainly applies to Bessie Smith’s engagement with mass-produced black American culture. The “imaginative” that my reading is invested in, though, is more akin to an aesthetic cultural imaginary, one that is not necessarily dictated by large-scale movements of information. Similarly, Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” ([1983] 1991) rely on the official and regimented circulations of print culture to bond peoples and nations. 19. The “ineffable pain” of Black Atlantic history is a major repetition in black critical discourse, from Gilroy back to Ellison, who suggests that the blues themselves exhibit the “impulse . . . to finger [the] jagged grain” of physical and psychic pain (1995, 90). 20. Transnational feminist analysis has done much to think about the significance of gender in the global-local splits of globalization. Perhaps even more useful is the gendering of the rural and the urban, as discussed by Jenny Sharpe (“Cartographies of Globalization,” 2005). 21. For more on surprising transurban trajectories of black diaspora and gender studies, see Jayna Brown’s cultural historical study Babylon Girls (2008). 22. Chakrabarty (1997); Paravisini-Gebert (2003). 23. Elizabeth Grosz, in her scholarship on time and social formation (1999), suggests that time is the ultimate category that can include and in some way demands inclusion of “difference.”

220 / notes 24. Gilroy’s ship, as the critical “chronotope” in Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) formation of the term, also takes into account spatial and historical movement. But the timing of diaspora outside of the historical chronology is not his goal, and the time inside the ship itself, in the interior, is often overwhelmed by its relationship to more “epic” historical events. Perhaps it is fairer to say that Gilroy does not extend his own chronotope far enough, especially in the recent work done on maritime laws and the nonnational temporalities that ships occasionally offered. 25. Carole Boyce Davies (1994) coins “migratory subjects” to think of black women’s writing and texts across various critical and canonical terrains. Rachel Lee, in “Notes from the (Non)field” (2002), maps this trend of disembodied margins and questions the political and theoretical expediency of such a move. 26. Rodríguez González distinguishes Kay’s use of Smith as a blues-based adoption still heavily based on language, whereas she sees the deployment of jazz in Trumpet as a more music-based, and hence more transgressive, method of “transcending time and the national” (2007, 89). Other critics have similarly noted Kay’s use of music and musicality as a way to elide strict identity politics, but all focus on her novel Trumpet. See also Fong (2011), Hartley (2011), C. Jones (2004), T. Walters (2007). 27. “Temples for tomorrow” references the Claude McKay poem “If We Must Die” (1970), as well as the 2001 collection Temples for Tomorrow, edited by Geneviève Fabre and Michel Feith, which comprehensively rethinks Harlem’s role in the past and future of diasporic black cultural studies. Considerations of futurity and feminism have been undertaken by Elizabeth Grosz and Robyn Wiegman, both of whom question the progress narratives which so often undergird academic undertakings in the name of feminism, in “Feminist Futures?” (2002) and “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures” (2000), respectively.

2 / It’s Lonely at the Bottom 1. In the realm of literature, not only Honor Ford-Smith but Caribbean poets Lorna Goodison (2000), Grace Nichols (1984), and Kamau Brathwaite (1977) have figured Nanny in their creative work, as have others in several scholarly invocations, most notably in Jenny Sharpe’s Ghosts of Slavery (2003). 2. The “bottom” figures heavily in blues history, including the popularized dance of “The Black Bottom,” which Ma Rainey capitalized on in her song “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (1923), which in turn became the title for August Wilson’s well-known play (1985). The Bottom is also the name of the thriving, postslavery black town in Morrison’s Sula (1973). 3. The bottom is located as the sign and (re)source of cultural and racial signification in sources as varied as Victorian sexologist Havelock Ellis’s work (1892) to Caribbean cultural critic Carolyn Cooper (1995) to choreographer and dance scholar Ananya Chatterjea (2004). 4. Kathryn Bond Stockton characterizes the proliferation of bottom representations as those “that capture not only a topsy-turvy of value but, more dramatically, an angle of attraction. It can be asked: what is so attractive about bottom sites, and by what logic does beauty find itself wed to shame? . . . Aesthetic attention is a way to expand the political curiosity—and finally, the investigative force—of these domains” (2006, 25). 5. Interestingly, the 1994 reprint of The Venus Hottentot replaced Charles Alston’s painting with a 1993 Carrie Mae Weems painted screen titled “The Apple of Adam’s

notes / 221 Eye,” further expanding the frame and theme of reference. See the cover images on the publisher’s website: Graywolfpress.org. 6. This is the illustration on whose silhouette the cover of Suzan Lori-Parks’s play Venus is modeled. Parks’s postmodern drama has garnered much controversy for its play on Baartman’s exaggerated physique and intellectual mien; see Elam and Rayner (1998), J. Young (1997), Warner (2008), Willis (2010) Chaudhuri (1996). 7. The work on Baartman is extraordinary in its breadth. For more on histories and contexts of racial display predating and including the Venus Hottentot, see Iwanisziw (2001), Qureshi (2004), and Magubane (2001), which interrogates the impulse to critically recover Baartman at all, much like Saidiya Hartman’s essay on Baartman (2008). For more on the diaspora representations of Baartman, see Nisco (2006) on Alexander, Renee Cox’s visual art, and poet Grace Nichols’s representation of the Venus legacy; Moudileno (2009) on Bessora’s francophone novel 53cm (2001), which includes references and a dedication to Baartman; Catanese (2010) on Parks’s and South African choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba’s work on Baartman; Miranda and Spencer’s (2009) work on Barbara Chase-Riboud’s (2004) historical novel on Baartman as well as a lesser-known sculptural work by the author; Tillet (2009) also on Chase-Riboud’s novel and the history of modern conceptions of “race” in France; Vlasopolos (2000) on Angela Carter’s “Black Venus” (in her 1995 collection, The Bloody Chamber); Netto (2005) on Venus 2000, the performance work of Lyle Ashton Harris and Renee Cox; and the many essays in Willis’s collection (2010), some of which are on representations of Venus and others of which are ruminations on her long legacy in the performance of black women’s bodies and sexuality, such as Carole Boyce Davies’s piece on carnival. For creative work not yet mentioned, see Stephen Gray’s collection of poems, Hottentot Venus and Other Poems (1979); Zoë Wicomb’s novel David’s Story (2001), which includes Baartman as a kind of postmodern South African ancestor; and a range of artwork, including Deborah Willis’s own. 8. Holmes also characterizes the bottom as a “fundamental cultural obsession,” the “zeitgeist” of Baartman’s time (2007, 43). 9. See Sedgwick and Frank (1995) for an in-depth discussion of shame and (homo) sexuality, and Kathryn Bond Stockton (2006) on shame as a form of sociality and communication. 10. The question of whether Venus performed in an actual cage is an open one, though Holmes asserts, “Although many women have appeared both before and since on leashes, chained, or in cages, both literally enslaved and enslaved for popular entertainment, Saartjie was not one of them” (2007, 49). See also Diana Taylor (2003) on the ethnographic and performative significance of “the cage.” 11. Cooper recasts the category of the “vulgar” in its application to working-class black women by reading “slackness” as subversion (1995). 12. Though fictional, we might also think of Alexander’s imagined eruption as a moment of what Lauren Berlant has coined “diva citizenship,” or the public emergence of political-sexual narratives of national (and international) formation that are also acts of pedagogy (1997). 13. This move was most famously critiqued by Chandra Mohanty (1984). 14. Saartjie Baartman’s remains were on display and then stored in France until 2002, when they were “returned” to and then commemorated in South Africa. Thenpresident Thabo Mbeki gave a difficult speech at her burial in 2002, one that bluntly quotes the racist scientific and philosophical texts of the Enlightenment.

222 / notes 15. Although, as T. Sharpley-Whiting points out, even Baartman’s linguistic skill was read as a sign of primitivist proclivities toward mimicry and “domestication” (1999, 24). See also Lucasi (2009) on representations of Baartman’s “speech” in Barbara Chase Riboud’s realist historical novel and Parks’s play based on Baartman. Lucasi points both to the historical presence of English-speaking black women in the nineteenth century and to the power of sound/the voice not just to give interiority to a subject but to “disrupt communal affect” (173) beyond the signs of visual difference. 16. David Johnson (2007) attempts to draw links between representation and economics in the historical legacy of Baartman and the Khoisan peoples of South Africa. 17. See Hershini Young’s working manuscript, “Coercive Performances.” 18. To focus only on the disciplining of bodies is to miss the ways that power is also, problematically, generative of other corporeal performances in Foucault’s formulation. 19. Alexander fleshes out black history as such in more current work as well, in American Sublime (2005), which sets its lyrics nearly entirely in nineteenth-century African American history. See Alexander (2005), Trethewey (2009), W. Walters (2010). 20. Oddly, Richards’s form and subject are reflected in a textbox of words pulled from the “scientific literature” on Baartman that appears at the end of one reprint of Anne Fausto-Sterling’s article on comparative anatomy (1995, 48). 21. According to Donald Bogle, the tragic mulatta “is made likeable—even sympathetic (because of her white blood, no doubt)—and the audience believes that the girl’s life could have been productive and happy had she not been a ‘victim of divided racial inheritance’” (2001, 9) 22. See Orecklin (1999). Not so coincidentally, Richards has a fantastic poem/ drama that imagines Halle Berry selling her soul to Grace Jones for her part in the film Boomerang, “The Halle Berry One-Two” (2004). 23. Shane Vogel locates Dandridge as one in a line of black female performers who, though enshrined for singular performances of overt sexuality, cultivated “aloofness” in onstage, cabaret personas in his work on singer/actress/activist Lena Horne (2009, 169). 24. For a further discussion of how race and death are intimately linked, see Sharon Holland’s Raising the Dead (2000), Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1996), Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death (1982), and Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (1997). 25. Carmen Jones earned Dorothy Dandridge an Oscar nomination after she aggressively campaigned for the role and, when filming began, started a now infamous affair with Otto Preminger, the movie’s director. 26. See also James Baldwin’s “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough” (1955; in The Price of the Ticket [1985]) for more on the function of the racialization of plots. Many thanks to Janaka Bowman for this connection. 27. The unspoken connection here is to the “bottom” of the sea, or the space of the Middle Passage that has been marked as the central route of the Black Atlantic. Here, of course, recovery is impossible—a notion I look at in this book’s final chapter, “Impossible Objects.” 28. Meta Jones aligns this with “jazz poetry”: “[it] can be seen as a way of playing with words, even more that it is a genre of poetry composed about jazz”—a form and a referent, or reference as form (2011, 82).

notes / 223 3 / The Drama of Dislocation 1. Ethnic Now 2007, Border Crossings n.d. 2. Anowa, Aidoo’s 1970 play (1995) on the direct issue of African slavery, past and present, would seem a more straightforward choice to commemorate the end of the British slave trade. As Haiping Yan says of that play, “Anowa’s journey is then doubled as a historical tragedy constitutive of a massively ruptured human geography called modern Africa” (2002, 249). But it is in the hybridity and ambivalence of The Dilemma of Ghost that colonial histories and national narratives meet in uneasy affiliations, hence my interest in this drama. 3. African diaspora studies hinges on just such a critical remapping of location; a geography of ideological, historical, material, and cultural connections among the routes of the chattel slave trade has emerged as the decisive terrain of African American studies since the early nineteen-nineties. Thinking beyond the nationalist and regionalist frameworks that have bound African American studies, in particular, and Caribbean, Black British, and Africanist studies of identity formation, as well, African diaspora studies suggests that these sites are intimately connected and that this connection, in fact, through the historical phenomenon of the slave trade, constitutes the start of what we call “modernity.” The technology of transporting bodies from site to site for a global economic system is, of course, not strictly a market shift but is, in a long view, the accumulation and sustaining work of cultural, ideological, political, and national narratives of rights, sovereignty, and subjectivity in a racialized context—in other words, what we call colonialism and the base of national formation. Of course, the technologies and mandates of travel and trade itself, its narratives from Columbus’s journals (D. Taylor 2003) to the proto-anthropology of both missionary texts and age of Enlightenment travel narratives, constitute another “body” of literature and knowledge that we could constitute the start of modernity around— the movement of texts, here in particular texts which concern themselves with the understanding of cultural difference predicated on geographic difference. To think through this “contact zone” (Pratt 2008) material as the site of modernity is to extend beyond the literal slave trade that acted as the exchange and violation of bodies as the primary site of organizing around the African diaspora and to do what Gilroy has elsewhere suggested (2005)—taking the long view of the primacy of colonialism itself, here engaged through the aesthetics of the text, as the central way of understanding modern concepts of race that dominate debates around state multiculturalism. 4. This ambivalent, spectacular materialism aligns with Claudia Barnett’s (2005) argument that Kennedy’s work both hews close to and obsessively references the familiar while at the same time disordering it as a fantasy. 5. See Kolin (2007a) and Löfgren (2003) for more on Kennedy’s integration into Civil Rights and Black Arts politics, as well as J. Jones (2005). 6. The original story on which the play is based can be found in the Adrienne Kennedy Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas. In box 2, folder 17, of the collection you can find two interrelated stories that are the foundation of what becomes Funnyhouse, both of which render scenes in Africa from the perspective of a daughter watching her parents’ marriage disintegrate while posted in Africa. A sample of the prose: “He has come to Africa to escape my unhappiness. Now things weighed heavy on me! He imagined that he . . . killed himself myself. Her

224 / notes name was Melena like him myself. She was an American, a blonde blue eyes with a face like a saint in some Jan Vermeer? She wore white dresses, the poinsettias in her hair. . . . She was married to March Crawford, a brilliant swaggering Negro sociologist, one of those highly extroverted men, who is always followed about by ranks of adoring students, a brutal dynamic captain obsessed with his work. He had come to Ghana to study for a year but had remained for almost five.” 7. J. Jones (2005). See also Frank (2007) and Kumar (2005) on the surrealist aesthetics of black women’s identity and ontology. 8. See Frederick Eberstadt’s photographs, reprinted in Kennedy’s Deadly Triplets (1990). 9. For more on minstrelsy and Funnyhouse, see Jacqueline Wood (2003). The dominant investigation of most Kennedy criticism is, of course, on the psychological effects of racism and identity: see, e.g., E. Brown (2001) and Ahad (2010). There is also the interesting systemic psychoanalytic critique that Elizabeth Sakellaridou gives us in “The Right to Unpleasure as Social Critique and Creative Method” (2008), worth noting for its validation of negative feeling as political act. 10. Parks’s Venus originally staged the main character with a prosthetic posterior, as well as dialogue that evacuates depth, mostly referencing desire for love, sex, and chocolate. In this, Parks exaggerates the historical representation of Baartman to critique it—a risky move that is dependent on audience interpretation and reads to some critics as reinforcing the visual and intellectual markers of race that Baartman’s tragic legacy already inhabits. The play, though, and Parks’s oeuvre, owes much to the nonrealist legacy of Adrienne Kennedy and her similarly difficult visual palette for Funnyhouse. For a comparison of Parks and Kennedy, see Aja Marneweck’s article (2004), which emphasizes their shared aesthetics of inhabiting exaggerated stereotype. 11. Robyn Wiegman makes a similar argument about interdisciplinarity around identity studies in her wonderful, broad critique of social-justice-based academic study, Object Lessons (2011). 12. As explored most recently by Michelle Stephens’s Black Empire (2005). 13. It is also, for one critic, a comparative companion piece to Lorraine Hansberry’s famous A Raisin in the Sun, a play that is also about the fissures of ideological belonging and the contradictory desires in the modern diaspora (Berrian 1987). 14. Aidoo is perhaps best known for her novels and short fiction, though Anowa is performed fairly regularly. Her fiction is also “postmodern,” or slightly askew from a social realist aesthetic. 15. See also Abrahams (1983) and Bascom (1975) on the dilemma tale, usually a conflict without clear resolution that involves a negotiation with community norms. 16. Aidoo also queers this line in her novel Our Sister Killjoy (1977), via multiple plots of disjointed “romance,” including a same-sex erotic encounter between Sissie, her black Ghanaian protagonist who is studying abroad, and a white German woman. 17. These combinations likely stem from Aidoo’s work with her mentor, Efua Sutherland, writer and founder of the Ghana Drama Studio. Sutherland also worked on transforming folktales into dramatic form, with heavy references to a Western literary canon (Gibbs 2009, 160–61). Aidoo was part of Sutherland’s studio when she wrote and produced Dilemma in 1964.

notes / 225 18. For more on the significance of “cultural translation” in Aidoo’s play, see Secovnie (2007). 19. This affective moment, especially for transnational feminist and globalization studies, has long since passed (though is still actively mourned). See, e.g., McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat, Dangerous Liaisons (1997). 20. See Laura Murphy’s (2009) reading of Anowa for an excavation of family and other social intimacies that the slave trade disallowed in Africa. 21. Ranu Samantrai’s compelling argument about Aidoo’s nationalism (referencing her novel Our Sister Killjoy) is to point out not just her critique of the “post-” in postcolonial but her strategic nationalism, one that is “provisional, historically conscious, and pragmatic” (1995, 142). See also Hena Ahmad (2010) on Aidoo’s “postnationalism” and Nana Wilson-Tagoe’s (2009) essay on nationalism in Anowa. 22. Several articles analyze the difficult trajectory of mimetic agency in Aidoo’s work: see Wilson-Tagoe (2009), Raji (2011), and Bryan (2006) on feminist agency, with Gyimah (2006) interrogating the stakes of masculinity in thinking through postcolonial agency. 23. See Femi Ojo-Ade ([1996] 2004), Adeola James (1990).

4 / Asymmetrical Possessions 1. Of course, that primitive categorization is often read as an attempt at genuine engagement with vernacular culture or a moment of signifying play with dominant cultural codes in the criticism surrounding Hurston’s body of work. See, e.g., Martin (2005), Chu (2005). 2. The argument that race and modernity are linked is one that Caribbean thinkers such as C. L. R James and others have made quite convincingly for some time (St. Louis 2007; Buhle and Henry 1992; James 1977, [1980] 2001, 1992). 3. Eyes was written during her time in Haiti. 4. Hemenway is, significantly, her biographer. Caribbeanist J. Michael Dash is perhaps her harshest political critic, arguing that Tell My Horse represents “the black American imagination at its least generous” (1997, 59). 5. On the question of Tell My Horse’s form and the definition of autoethnography as a genre, see Sorensen (2005), Dutton (1993), Trefzer (2000), Clifford (1997), Pratt (1992), Lionnet (2001), Emery (2005), and Chancy (2010). For a critique and model of postmodern autoethnography, see Viswesweran (1994). See also Shirley Toland-Dix’s (2007) piece on Hurston’s and Brodber’s converging identities as social scientists and fiction writers. 6. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (2000) explores the connections and divergences of Dunham’s work with Hurston’s in Haiti regarding US occupation. 7. Prominent African American visitors to Haiti included Frederick Douglass (1893), W. E. B. Du Bois (1944, but with extensive writing about Haiti from the nineteen-twenties), James Weldon Johnson (1920), and Langston Hughes (1932). Most went to dispel the common thread of European and white travelogues that “culled material for best-selling texts that told readers what they most wanted to hear, . . . that blacks were incapable of self-rule” (Farmer 1994, 189). 8. Baraka’s term modifies Harlem, not Haiti, in “Return of the Native” (2006). 9. The Haitian Revolution is usually recognized as starting with a slave revolt in 1791 and ending with declared independence on January 1, 1804.

226 / notes 10. Scott reads this into the appendix of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, consciously trying to reach against the grain of the main text’s discourse of masculinist heroics. 11. The sources are too numerous to list here, but some central articles are Rowe (2000b), Carby (1990), Wall (1995), Reed (1990), as well as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s edited collection on Hurston (1990). 12. Houston Baker begins his essay on black modernity by claiming, “Temporally, modernity is always situated before or after the revolution” (1994, 7). Though he does not specify “the” revolution as specifically Haitian, he hints at such in claiming that, in mainstream US culture, said revolution must always be produced as a “well-passed aberration,” in line with both David Scott’s (2004) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (1995) arguments about the failure of Western history to account for the Haitian Revolution in all of its complexity. 13. This position is one that Erica Edwards (2012) unpacks in her reading of Hurston’s 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain. Sánchez-Pardo looks at Hurston’s “doubleness” in Tell My Horse, claiming that her identification with imperialism is meant as a cover to make her more subversive observations sink through to mainstream audiences (2008, 297). She likens this to Karen McCarthy Brown’s (2006) tactical description of possession as performance. 14. See Burton (1997) on reproduced class/colonial hierarchies in Vodou and spirit possession. See Mikell (1982) on the tension between Hurston’s class and national position and her role as an anthropologist of Vodou in Haiti. 15. See also Baker’s “Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance” ([1987] 1999) on possession. 16. See John Carlos Rowe’s article and subsequent chapter on Tell My Horse (2000b) or Anne Trefzer (2000). 17. In Mules and Men, she even participates in “lying contests” ([1935] 1990, 65). 18. Perhaps this is where a recent critic (Meaney 2009) locates Hurston’s body politics, or a black gendered body that is of use to black intellectualism, not the other way around. 19. We can think of the “financially able” qualification to Vodou initiation that I mention earlier in this chapter as one example (Hurston [1938] 2009, 174–75). 20. You could argue that it is also laid bare in Their Eyes Were Watching God, in the Eatonville section and through the trial scene’s cartography of black and white reception of Janie and Janie’s story. 21. Hurston’s infamous line from Janie’s grandmother in Their Eyes Were Watching God should be recalled here—“De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so far as Ah can see” ([1937] 2010, 29)—as it will also find traction in the final chapter of this book in a discussion of Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. 22. See Strongman (2008) and Tinsley (2011) for more on potentially radical reformations of gender normativity within Haitian and Haitian Vodun culture. 23. Meaney suggests that Hurston spends little time in “women’s communities” (2009, 782), perhaps picking up on the text’s focus on taking down charismatic male leadership (and Hurston’s reveling in her role as often the lone woman included in certain rituals and rites). Of course, women are hardly absent from Hurston’s narrative—they just do not follow a script of representation that gives them full centrality. Here, I argue that Hurston’s sequencing, too, represents a feminist critique.

notes / 227 24. Simone Drake (2006) suggests that the text sets up, in fact, a rivalry of sorts between Hurston and Garvey. 25. In fact, in Louisiana, she has Reuben participate in marketing black music alongside the less lucrative business of psychic possession. See also Krasner on UNIA parades (2002). 26. For a detailed ideological discussion of contemporary Vodou hierarchy, see Burton (1997), 238–39. 27. Critics such as Dayan (1996) remain rightly skeptical of “technoscapes,” though Appadurai (1996) and Anderson ([1983] 1991), for example, still adopt an ambivalent but inevitable “new community” approach. Kutzinski argues that “the ethnographic narrative is pulled away from expected linear coherence, and the tools of the ethnographer’s trade, be they tape recorders or academic conventions that inscribe and preserve separate identities, assume the function of mere realist props,” in her article on Louisiana’s intercultural American imaginative geography and form (2001, 71). Gourdine speaks of ethnographic writing as “detail[ing] the tension between the intellectual spirit of anthropological research and its disciplinary confinements” (2004, 143), using Brodber’s own nonfiction work to emphasize a new link between writing, research, and the black female body. Winks (2009), on a different Brodber text, suggests the author’s investment in “listening” as a key diasporic act of translation that connects to technology and the tape recorder of Louisiana. Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s (2011) reading of Brodber’s latest novel, 2007’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake, argues for the novelist’s relocation of the “yam” as a root of Caribbean identity and meaning. This serves as an interesting counter to the tape recorder of Louisiana and, I think, tempers any fetishization of its presence as one that assumes modernity only in the inorganic. DeLoughrey’s piece particularly thinks, via Sylvia Wynter, of the organic as the site of modernity. 28. These folk culture tales were first recorded by another one of Franz Boas’s anthropology students, Martha Beckwith, in 1924. 29. Michelle Stephens’s Black Empire (2005) expertly and innovatively traces the masculinist roots of some of these imaginaries. 30. One need only look at scholarship on Creole culture such Shirley Thompson’s Exiles at Home (2009) or, in contemporary theory, Joseph Roach’s theory of “circumatlantic” performance out of New Orleans in Cities of the Dead (1996). 31. The connections between Haiti and Louisiana are themselves numerous and surprising, from the physical displacement of both slaves and twentieth-century immigrants coming through Cuba to the Haitian Revolution’s ideological influence over historical events such as the Louisiana Purchase. For further connection, see “The Common Routes of Louisiana and Haiti: A Creative Power,” special issue, Southern Quarterly 44 (3) (2007). 32. Hurston’s text and even one such as choreographer Katherine Dunham’s Journey to Accompong (1947) certainly straddle this line, and Dunham was trained by Melville Jean Herskovits, another Franz Boas–influenced anthropologist. 33. Denise deCaires Narain remarks on the deemphasizing of Ella’s “body” as sexual (1999) that it is a trade-off for the good of the diasporic whole. But as both traditional representations of sexuality and motherhood are deemphasized and disordered in most of the texts studied throughout this book, I would perhaps scale back the reading of this absence as feminine sacrifice and read it more as an intellectual refusal

228 / notes to dwell in recognizable scenes of black women’s community significance: as mothers or, conversely, as the overdetermined signifiers of historical desire. In some ways, the texts studied here might pessimistically find it too impossible to engage in these systems of gendered and raced meaning, though critics have managed to relocate the body and desire in the linguistic play of Mullen and even Philip (in chapter 6). As Cynthia James argues about Louisiana, texts such as Brodber’s reemphasize “female endurance” on the broad historical scene of the Caribbean—and I would argue, of the diaspora (2001, 2). Brodber does so through the discursive connections across black feminist networks, not through blood definition or genealogy. 34. Pollard (2006) suggests that song and sound are key venues for transdiaspora connections in black women’s writing, citing the presence of this song in Brodber’s text. E. Smith (2005) argues that the “acoustics” of the novel are also transhistorically anachronistic in terms of the technological possibility of the tape recorder of the text, though that anachronism serves to heighten the diasporic affiliations being claimed. Page (2005) makes a similar argument about the function of cultural migration rather than migrations of peoples as a source of connection, one that circumvents the difficulties of immigration law, particularly for women. Khokher (2004) also showcases culture as diaspora connection in the novel. Sharpe (2012) suggests the history acts as the mark of connection, here through affectual means rather than archival fact. 35. Critics such as Curdella Forbes (2007) locate the text’s politics outside of or beyond strategies of Caribbean nationalism. For Forbes, Louisiana offers a paradigm of “liberation” through religion. Saunders (2001) makes a similar claim about the text’s postnationalist politics, arguing that the novel redefines “history” through its epistemic challenge not just to the archive but also to memory itself. Arguing about a later innovative Brodber novel, The Rainmaker’s Mistake, DeLoughrey states that Brodber “poses an ontological alternative to the teleological plot of liberation” (2011, 66), and the same could be said about Louisiana’s reordering of Afro-Caribbean and transnational American history here.

5 / Intimate Migrations 1. Robyn Wiegman’s recent Object Lessons (2011) makes a similar point to my own regarding American identity studies. 2. This is especially taken up in Wicomb’s work. See Van der Vlies (2011), Macmillan and Graham (2011). 3. Andrade (2011) takes up this project of reading the domestic as allegorical. But we might cite a number of other feminist critics on the potential uses of romance plots here, from Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s reading romance as a series of “social forms expressed at once in individual desires and in a collective code of action including law” (1985, 2) to Belinda Edmondson’s (1999) collection on romance as the idealization of postcoloniality in Caribbean cultural texts. See also Felski (2003) and Stratton (1994) on the feminist pitfalls of the marriage plot. 4. See Gikandi (1992), Quayson (2000), A. Ahmad (1987), and Jameson (1986), among others, on the “Third World” novel as allegory and its relationship to postmodernism. See Andrade (2009) on the antimimetic turn. 5. See Rita Felski (2003) or Paula Moya (2000) on feminist politics of realism. Moya suggests an approach that is a combination of intersectionality and standpoint theory, claiming a feminist “realism” that does not evenly equate to experience (following

notes / 229 critiques of experience levied by Joan Scott, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and other “postmodernist” feminists). Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem also critique the “cult of transparent ‘experience’” (1999, 12), but they turn not to realism but to deep critiques of the forms of subjectivity that liberal humanism claims as valuable, through national citizenship and through discourses of global feminism alike. Felski argues against any aesthetic regimen for a feminist politics itself (2003). 6. This reading follows in a long line of recognizing Head as both responding to Western views of Africa and contesting inequality in an African context (Thorpe 1983). 7. See S. Young (2010), Counihan (2011), and Gohrbandt (1998, 2007). 8. See also Harrow on how “the village is as much governed by its own authorities, with their normative set of limits and confines, as by the state” (1993a, 175). Harrow sees “woman” as the “excluded term” for Head in her work, managed out of agency and community by these power structures. Kwadwo Osei-Nyame (2002) sees this outsider view as part of Head’s binational, stateless life, in exile from South Africa in Botswana. This somewhat contrasts with Coundouriotis’s (2011) reading of Head’s village as an alternative to national community. See also Earl Ingersoll (1999) on Head’s careful construction of African masculinities that counter hegemonic structures, as well as her critique of those who participate in them. 9. See MacKenzie (1989) and Ingersoll (1999). 10. See Gohrbandt’s “Embracing the Alien Inside” (2007) for a reading of Head’s complicated relationship to sociality in her writing. 11. In a different context, this reflects and counters Kenneth Harrow’s (2006) claim for David’s Story that it represents a transition between punishment and discipline as modes of state control in the New South Africa. Here, we see Third World Women narratively disciplining the bodies of coloured and white citizens, while the looming punishment of state laws regarding intraracial intimacy remains unspoken. 12. See Rita Barnard (2007) on the particular significance of space in South African literature, both during apartheid and especially in the transitional period following its demise. 13. These narrative gaps mimic the spatial gaps in the story and in the collection as a whole—a cognitive and critical mapping that critic Rita Barnard (2007) notes is crucial in thinking through the politics of South Africa and that Guillaume Cingal (2005) argues for in this collection in particular. Maxine Sample (1991) does a more generalized reading of the significance of place in (re)defining women’s identities in Head’s collection. 14. We might understand these in-between temporalities in the terms that other critics sometimes read this work, as a coming of age, coming to terms with racial identity genre (Sicherman 1997; Jacobs 2008). 15. Renk (2009), Hannan (2010), Morris (1993), Rippl (1999), Shemak (2005), Stouck (2005), Welsh (1999), Timothy (2001), DeLoughrey (2007a). 16. McLeod also, interestingly, cites Jackie Kay’s novel about a transgender blues star, Trumpet, as an example of this “business unbegun” of postcolonial magical realism, though there are not overly marvelous happenings in that the novel, which presents a “straight” realist narrative of transgender concealment. 17. See Guardian interview (Gee 2010). 18. In The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy lays out his argument for the ship as a trope of both the temporal and spatial dimensions of Black Atlantic cultural production, in

230 / notes both the traumatized history of the Middle Passage and the liminal space of freedom that the nonnationalist spaces of ships held for black sailors and black travelers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 19. As Benítez-Rojo argues in The Repeating Island, we should not necessarily think of this entropic idea as ideal: “There is nothing marvelous in this, or even enviable,” Benítez-Rojo flatly states of the “excessive, dense, uncanny, asymmetrical, entropic, hermetic” Caribbean text and its tension between hybridity and origin (1996, 4, 23). 20. Several critics point to this humanism through Melville’s insistence on both the pre- and postcolonial significance of indigenous land and populations (see Renk 2011, Misrahi-Barak 2011, DeLoughrey 2007a, Shemak 2005). As all, but especially DeLoughrey and Shemak, point out, these investments are not moves to authenticate but to envision more complex postmodern futures that necessary include populations and landscapes rendered invisible by neocolonialism. 21. See Richter (2011) on ghosts in Wicomb’s work (particularly David’s Story).

6 / Impossible Objects 1. This is a doubleness that Mullen explicates herself in a recovery of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetics (2007). The piece stands as its own defense of the lyric as it is now tied to conventional lyric forms of identity politics. It also rejects analyses of the lyric and of lyric subjectivity as solipsistic, instead linking the form with women and/or nonwhite practitioners as an aesthetic strategy. See Bettridge for further analysis of the ethical tensions of lyric and innovation in Mullen’s work and in poetry at large (2004, 212–13). 2. Magee (2004), M. Jones (2011), and Lempert (2010) all engage this democratic form as linked to Mullen’s jazz aesthetic—at once intimately recognizable in an African American frame and avant-garde/experimental. Shockley (2011) importantly resituates Mullen in the blues, as does Jones, with her emphasis on the lyric and the popular, especially when it comes to references to music itself. 3. Recent scholarship around the Greek poet Sappho has both questioned and celebrated her particularly queer status. One such reading by John Winkler uses the trope of “double consciousness” to think through Sappho’s “dual literacy” of the lyric (2008, 57). Reading queer sexuality as an open secret, spoken in code, is nothing new, but the act of writing and reading in a kind of code to mask or subvert certain social-political identities is a critical act of interpretation that begs the question of complex alliances of form and structure that link marginal cultural productions, as in Muse & Drudge. See also the aforementioned Mullen (2007) on Dunbar, and Hogue (2002) on Mullen and linguistically coded “whiteness.” 4. This obviously draws on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Signifying Monkey (1988) as well as contemporary renegotiations of that theory, particularly Harryette Mullen’s own “African Signs and Spirit Writing” (1996), discussed briefly in the introduction. 5. See Beall (2005) for a fascinating look at how Mullen’s linguistic play engages in cognitive poetics, defamiliarizing language and its reception. See also Huehls (2003) on Mullen and play. 6. Critics also analyze these visualizations of discourse, and their particular spacing in the text, as a giving visibility to silence. See Hoving on how “silence functions as the irrepressible possibility of otherness” (1995, 164), a critical location that McKittrick (2006) takes up as an alternative geography for black women’s subjectivity in Philip’s work. Hoving says of Philip, “she writes as if she is the first historian of silence, its very

notes / 231 first mythographer” (1995, 162). Other critics on Philip’s use of silence include Marriott (1996), D. Jones (2004), Miller (1996). 7. See Guttman (1996) on the legal, historical, and mythic components of She Tries Her Tongue. 8. This charge seems particularly apt for Philip, who in seeking exile in Canada is both dislocated into a country where immigrant and Afro- identities are not a part of the national imaginary and located in a new community of expats and second-generation writers from the Caribbean, including Dionne Brand. For more on Philip’s Afro-Canadian identity, see R. Walcott (1997), Chancy (1999), Kang (2009), and McKittrick (2006). 9. At least poetically, that is. Philip has also provocatively said, “Writing essays clears the argument out for me so that by the time I am writing poetry there is no temptation to make argument” (Saunders 2005, 216). In She Tries Her Tongue, Philip includes both the argument (the introductory essay) and the poetry, indicating the tension in this hybrid form between description and definition. See Fumagalli (2003) for a characterization of the tension between poems in the collection/book as “voluntary” and “involuntary” associations, further complicating the relationship between “choice” and linguistic “play” in Philip’s text. 10. See H. Nigel Thomas on Philip’s text as a “challenge” to T. S. Eliot and his “objective correlative” (1993, 68). Thomas locates the lifted prose sections and their pedagogical repurposing as part of a recognizable Black Aesthetic practice, in aim if not in form. See also Stephen Morton (2008) on how She Tries Her Tongue exposes Pound’s and Eliot’s own epic poetic texts. For a discussion of the “racialized cultural work” of poets such as Pound and Eliot, see DuPlessis (2000). 11. This use of only existing words is one she takes literally in her collection Zong!, on the slaveship rebellion, in which she uses only the found text of the court cases springing from the insurance loss of “property” to make the book-length poem. See Moïse (2010), and Hilkovitz (2011) for readings of the text and its aesthetic and generic experiments with history. 12. Mullen speaks about reordering her quatrains or reading in random orders at public events. See Frost (2000). 13. Teresa L. Ebert’s 1992 text Ludic Feminism and After levies a critique of such poststructuralist, postmodern moves in feminist theory on the grounds of materialism. Difficult Diasporas clearly errs on the side of the discursive but seeks to claim the discursive as materially significant to “transformative social change,” as Ebert frames it.

Coda 1. We might interrogate our own critical fear of capacity, especially capacity of meaning, using corporeally located theory such as Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2006) concept of the “stretch” of both bodies and their capacity to be read. 2. Interestingly, Spivak poses this against “affect,” the supposed mode of the lyric. So one might argue that Difficult Diasporas presents the abstract affective. Toni Morrison also offers up reading as an assessment of “response-ability” (1993, xi). 3. The phrase comes from Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson’s Strange Affinities: The Sexual and Gender Politics of Comparative Racialization (2011), an edited collection on the connections and disconnections between race studies scholarship and gender and sexuality studies.

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Index

aesthetics: of accumulation, 175–200; aesthetic of time, 91; alternative, 51; of diaspora, 88, 176; diaspora enacted as aesthetics of identity, 9–10; Fanon on politically representative, 199; feminist, 5, 16–17, 42, 105, 181; identity as matter of ethics and, 216n32; innovative, 4, 8, 16, 205; literary and cultural production in construction of race, gender, and location, 4–5; mapping Black Atlantic feminist, 10–17; and politics, 3, 210n4; realist, 149; Walcott on New World, 81; of Wicomb, 163. See also black aesthetic Africa: in Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, 82, 95, 96–97, 100, 101–3; in Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, 86, 90; postcolonial, 83, 94, 98, 100, 102 Aidoo, Ama Ata: Anowa, 93, 104, 223n2, 224n14, 225n20; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; Our Sister Killjoy, 224n16, 225n21; “To Be an African Woman Writer,” 201. See also Dilemma of a Ghost, The (Aidoo) Alexander, Elizabeth: American Sublime, 222n19; Antebellum Dreambook, 62; Diva Studies, 53; on gaps between transmission of history and memory, 49; genealogies of performance in, 50; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; poetics of, 45–46, 47, 52, 74–75; strategy of, 48; ultimate strategy

of, 76. See also Venus Hottentot, The (Alexander) Baartman, Saartjie (Venus Hottentot): in Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot, 49, 50, 52, 55–63; bottom of, 45, 46, 49, 54, 55, 57, 61, 69; in Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, 181–83; narrative restraint in addressing body of, 47; recent work on, 55, 221n7; remains of, 59, 221n14 Baker, Houston, 2, 115, 118, 119, 137, 211n9, 212n16, 226n12 Baraka, Amiri, 111, 209n2, 215n26 Bessie Smith (Kay), 18–43; “A jar of Harlem night air,” 18, 21, 29, 38–39, 41, 42; as amalgam of blues and nineteensixties Scotland, 12–13, 19; in Harlem, 20–24, 31–32; projects itself into act of collection, 35–36; queer desire in, 19, 24; queer time in, 37–43; reorders genealogy of black culture and black reception, 28–29; repositions popular performance in genealogy of diaspora, 19–20; structure of, 25–26 black aesthetic: Alexander’s work and, 53; Black Arts on, 215n26; black women’s writing and conservative readings of, 4; the blues as paradigmatic for, 2; and dominant culture, 210n7; Ellis’s “New Black Aesthetic,” 209n1; Hurston and, 107; Kay’s Bessie Smith and, 19, 20

266 / index Black Arts movement, 54, 84, 215n26, 217n2 black feminism: in Brodber’s Louisiana, 124, 127, 131, 134, 135; in critique of Hurston and Brodber, 107; in extension of African American canon, 6; Garvey as hero of, 127; on Harlem Renaissance, 217n1; in Hurston’s Tell My Horse, 110, 111, 112, 117–18, 120; mapping Black Atlantic feminist aesthetics, 10–17; in Melville’s The Migration of the Ghosts, 168, 173; in Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, 178; in Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, 178, 195; representation as central issue for, 214n24; on women’s performance, 23, 217n4 black women: in Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, 78, 79, 81, 93–103; antihuman demands on bodies of, 196–97; blueswomen, 29, 36–37; bodies as modes of diaspora intellectual practice, 58; bottoms, 44–76; deaths and downfalls of, 69; gendered fictions of black modernity, 106–41; genealogy of bodies of, 13; haunting trope and, 35; as hypersexualized, 181; hypervisibility of, 66–67; identitarian categories that converge in, 7; in Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, 78, 79, 81, 83–93; mobility of, 2–3; in Mullen’s Muse & Drudge, 178, 180–88; overlaps and incommensurability in models of, 19; in Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, 178; as political agents, 44–45; queer, 28; rethinking foundational significance of, 16–17; staging of bodies of, 14. See also black feminism; black women’s writing black women’s writing: as academic problem, 205; Aidoo’s “To Be an African Woman Writer” on, 201; as boundary crossing, 8; and conservative readings of black aesthetic, 4; and gender as system of oppressive realism, 144; of Harlem Renaissance, 62; as marginalized, 46; performs reconstruction of possibilities of diaspora studies, 9–10; Philip and, 189, 190, 198; respectability politics in, 203; social realism and visionary romance in, 37; untapped potential of, 5–6 blues, the: bluesmen, 29, 36–37; bottoms in, 220n2; bourgeois, 210n7; in Brodber’s

Louisiana, 123; as complicated Foucauldian order of things, 1–2; figures as icons or heroes, 26–27; lesbian, 40; movement foregrounded in, 216n33; Mullen associated with, 230n2; timing in, 37, 42; travel in, 24, 39, 41 bottoms (buttocks), 44–76; in Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot, 49–63; of Baartman, 45, 49, 54, 55, 57, 61, 69; in the blues, 220n2; of Dandridge, 45, 67, 70, 71, 73; in Ford-Smith’s “A Message from Ni,” 44, 62, 69, 75; as near reference to sex itself, 50–51; in Richards’s “Beauty Projection,” 63, 64, 65; in Richards’s “C’est l’amour,” 67–73; of the sea, 222n27; as sign of cultural and racial significance, 46, 220n3 Brodber, Erna: on Garvey, 125–26; maintains fixed subject positions and cultural methods, 140; Myal, 129; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; The Rainmaker’s Mistake, 227n27, 228n35; on realism, 142. See also Louisiana (Brodber) Carby, Hazel, 6, 8, 111, 201, 202, 218n4 Collector of Treasures, The (Head), 150–57; “The Collector of Treasures,” 156–57; complex relationship between plot and sequence in, 12; “cool stance” in, 151, 152, 157, 158, 164, 168; “The Deep River: A Story of Ancient Tribal Migration,” 154; on desire for connection, 147; “Life,” 155–56; “Looking for a Rain God,” 156; narrative dissonance between sequencing and representations of gender in, 15; on revisions of romance plots, 148; “Snapshots of a Wedding,” 145, 150–53, 157, 163, 170; “The Wind and the Boy,” 150, 154–55 corporeality: in Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, 80, 93–103; black women’s bodies’ as hypersexualized, 181; black women’s bodies as modes of diaspora intellectual practice, 58; crisis of black women’s bodies, 76; gendered, 78, 79, 82, 103, 108, 196, 226; genealogy of black women’s bodies, 13; history and bodies, 104; in Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, 80, 83–93; reconsidering

index / 267 primacy of, 11; slave body, 97–98; staging of black women’s bodies, 14; unruly bodies of Third World Women, 150; verbs of the body in Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, 196–97. See also bottoms (buttocks) cosmopolitanism: in Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, 100; black, 24, 47, 53, 62; Brodber’s Louisiana on spirit possession and, 128; cool, 164; cosmopolitan poetics, 76; cosmopolitan; redress, 52; defined, 47; in diaspora feminism, 53; modern diaspora as cosmopolitan, 91 Dandridge, Dorothy, 12, 45, 67–73, 222n25 Davies, Carole Boyce, 2, 6, 8, 93, 104, 144, 152, 216n34, 220n25, 221n7 diaspora: aesthetics of, 88, 176; in Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, 96–98; alternative, 41, 80; in Brodber’s Louisiana, 124, 130–32, 137; contradictory desire for community and mobility, 144; critical research practices around, 202–8; defining, 7, 213n21; diasporic modernity, 120, 132, 143; difficult, 3–4, 6–10, 42, 207; feminism, 1–17, 50, 53, 103, 123, 134, 148, 176, 179, 183, 188, 206, 216n35; Garvey as symbol of, 125; Harlem as site of critical interest for, 21, 217n1; historic continuities between Africa and, 79; and history, 78, 104; in Hurston’s Tell My Horse, 118; hybridity, 171; innovative linguistic practice and, 205; Kay’s Bessie Smith and, 19–43; in Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, 86, 91–92; literacy, 109, 123, 127, 129, 134, 137, 180; in Melville’s The Migration of the Ghosts, 167, 168; as moving target, 46; New Orleans as site of diasporic activity, 131, 227n30; in Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, 189, 190, 195, 197; politics, 42, 51, 94; and relationality, 148; time’s relationship to, 38, 41; tradition-versusmodernity line and, 10–11; trauma of, 28, 130; in Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, 164; women’s routes in, 211n13 Dilemma of a Ghost, The (Aidoo), 93–103; absence of key locations in standard

narrative of black diaspora, 79–80; alcohol and cigarettes in, 99, 100, 103; chorus in, 93, 96, 99, 100, 101, 103, 155; as commemoration of abolition of slave trade, 77, 82, 93, 103; on diaspora, 96–98; dilemma of, 97, 99–100, 101; dislocation as critical strategy for, 103–4; first performance of, 81, 104; inhabits modernity of racial trauma, 105; London performance of 2007, 77–78, 103; realist boundaries of the body questioned by, 14; theatrical strategies in, 80, 82 Edwards, Brent, 23, 66, 104, 199–200, 211n12, 213n21, 218n5 Ellison, Ralph, 18–19, 21, 23, 118, 219n19 feminism: diaspora, 1–17, 50, 53, 103, 123, 134, 148, 176, 179, 183, 188, 206, 216n35; feminist aesthetics, 5, 16–17, 42, 105, 181; feminist genealogies, 50; feminist performance, 78, 105; feminist realism, 149, 228n5; ideals of freedom and individualism, 143; traditionversus-modernity line and, 10–11; transnational, 5, 7, 10, 11, 32, 50, 59, 74, 92, 124, 142, 143, 154, 157, 166, 186, 198, 203, 211n10, 219n20. See also black feminism Ford-Smith, Honor: critique of poetics of representation, 47; “imagined” children of, 50; poetics of, 74. See also “Message from Ni, A” (Ford-Smith) Foucault, Michel, 1, 50, 52–53, 75, 175, 209n3 Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy), 82–93; absence of key locations in standard narrative of black diaspora, 79–80; aesthetic strategy, 88; on diaspora, 86, 91–92; dislocation as critical strategy for, 103–4; first performance of, 81, 104; hanging body of Sarah, 90, 97; inhabits modernity of racial trauma, 105; multiple, fragmented selves in, 83; plot, 84, 87; realist boundaries of the body questioned by, 14; reorganizes binary visions of history, 78; Sarah’s monologue on her rooms, 89; scene between Raymond the Funnyman and “Duchess of Hapsburg,” 84–85, 96; story on which it is based, 223n6; Western popular culture in, 87

268 / index Garvey, Marcus, 123–29, 131, 135 Gates, Henry Louis, 118, 119, 157, 216n31, 230n4 gender: as central to understanding colonialism and diaspora, 97; challenging how we conceive and read, 10; difference that it makes for race, 104; dislocation, 94–95; gendered bodies, 78, 79, 82, 103, 108, 196, 226; in Head’s The Collector of Treasures, 154, 156, 157; at heart of notions of modernity, 14–15; and history, 78; literary and cultural production in construction of, 4–5; in Melville’s The Migration of the Ghosts, 166; and modernity, 107; popular performances marked by, 50; reconstructed as collection of critiques, 15; studies, 4, 7, 206, 213n20; as system of oppressive realism, 144; thinking around, 8–9; in Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, 158, 161. See also women Gilroy, Paul, 6–7, 9, 21, 33, 65, 94, 166, 212n17, 219n19, 220n24, 223n3, 229n18 Harlem: and Brodber’s Louisiana, 123, 136, 137; in Kay’s Bessie Smith, 20–24, 31–32; in Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, 84, 89; New Orleans contrasted with, 131; as prophetic, 37, 42. See also Harlem Renaissance Harlem Renaissance: Alston, 54; Black Arts movement and, 217n2; black feminist critics on, 217n1, 217n4; Hurston and, 111; Locke on, 21–22; queer genealogy for black culture in, 28; women writers, 62 Hartman, Saidiya, 47, 51–52, 83, 204, 221n7 Head, Bessie: mobile narrative techniques in, 144; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; on revising realism, 145. See also Collector of Treasures, The (Head) Hunt, Erica, 2–3, 216n33 Hurston, Zora Neale: on black women as mules of the world, 180–81; Brodber on legacy of, 124–25; “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 106, 112, 116, 139–40; documents vernacular black culture, 106–7; feminist ethnographic forms of, 142; mobile textual practices

in, 12; Mules and Men, 109, 110, 115, 118, 122, 226n17; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; as outlier in history of black thought, 23; Their Eyes Were Watching God, 110, 120, 226n20, 226n21; on will to adorn, 191, 215n26. See also Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (Hurston) James, C. L. R., 43, 113, 125, 131, 225n2, 226n10 Jones, Meta, 47, 49, 181, 222n28, 230n2 Kay, Jackie: imagined identification between Smith and, 30–32; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; Other Lovers, 24–25, 40, 41; “Out of Hand,” 218n13; as queer, 25; “The Red Graveyard,” 24–25, 28; “The Right Season,” 40; as Scottish, 12, 25, 26, 33, 218n8; on short fiction, 149; Trumpet, 12, 19, 26, 218n7, 218n8, 219n16, 220n25. See also Bessie Smith (Kay) Kennedy, Adrienne: occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; The People Who Led to My Plays, 86, 87, 91, 92. See also Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy) Last One Out (Richards), 63–73; “Beauty Projection,” 63–66, 67; “C’est l’amour,” 67–73, 75, 76; mobile textual practices in, 12; “Parable,” 66–67; popular cultural figure used to remap genealogy of black corporeality, 13; Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town compared with, 162 Locke, Alain, 21–22, 23, 37, 42 Louisiana (Brodber), 122–39; aesthetics of the partial of, 127; asymmetry and critique of, 107, 132–39; diasporic affinities of, 14–15; on modernity defined through syncretism and hybridity, 140–41; possession in confrontation with black modernity, 108–10, 122–39; postmodern metatextual parts of, 12; “prologue” of, 124, 128, 132–33; tape recorder in, 128– 32; on untranslatable, commodifiable nature of knowledge production, 142

index / 269 Melville, Pauline: mobile narrative techniques in, 144; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; on revising realism, 145; scholarship on, 165; The Ventriloquist’s Tale, 170. See also Migration of the Ghosts, The (Melville) “Message from Ni, A” (Ford-Smith): on invented dreams, 44, 48, 62, 75; move to space of subjective interiority in, 48; on Nanny catching bullets and throwing them back, 44; Nanny seeks genre to make her body visible, 74; tension between narrative play and corporeal historical materialism in, 49 Middle Passage, 81, 95, 97, 130, 166, 183 Migration of the Ghosts, The (Melville), 165–73; complex relationship between plot and sequence in, 12; on desire for connection, 147; “The Duende,” 168, 172; “Erzulie,” 168, 172; “The Lucifer’s Shank,” 172; “Mrs da Silva’s Carnival,” 146, 168–70, 171, 172; narrative dissonance between sequencing and representations of gender in, 15; narrative strategy of, 167; “The Parrot and Descartes,” 168, 172; “The President’s Exile,” 172; on revisions of romance plots, 148 modernity: in Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, 96; black, 106–41; diasporic, 120, 132, 143; gender at heart of notions of, 14–15; Head’s The Collector of Treasures on the traditional and, 151; postcolonial, 134, 144; privileges of, 93–94; race and, 107, 108, 225n2; slave trade and, 223n3; versus tradition, 10–11, 108; in Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, 163 Mohanty, Chandra, 15, 50, 142, 145, 146, 147, 150, 173, 207, 210n7, 214n24 Morrison, Toni, 4, 203, 210n8, 212n17 Mullen, Harryette: jazz aesthetic of, 230n2; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; on orality, 216n30; on poetic dissonance, 47; refusal of completion and coherence, 177–78; on theoretical discourse in recent black poetry, 51; Turner on aesthetic of, 205. See also Muse & Drudge (Mullen)

Muse & Drudge (Mullen), 180–88; accumulation of references in, 175, 176; affectual experience in, 179; “I” in, 179, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187; as nonnarrative epic, 16, 184; paratactic style of, 199–200; on pleasures of compiling and consuming language, 198–99; reciprocity in, 180, 184; on Sapphire, 180, 183; teaching, 202–3 Nanny of the Maroons, 44, 46, 48, 62, 69, 74, 75, 220n1 Pan-Africanism: in Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, 94; in Brodber’s Louisiana, 133; Hurston and Brodber’s critiques of, 14–15, 108, 130; in Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, 91, 103–4; legacies of, 81; Bessie Smith as hero of, 27 Philip, M. NourbeSe: exile in Canada, 231n8; “Notes on the Completion of Potentiality,” 204; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; refusal of completion and coherence, 177–78; on writing essays, 231n9. See also She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Philip) postcolonialism: inf luence on this study, 11; literature of, 145; in Melville’s The Migration of the Ghosts, 168; Nanny of the Maroons as hero of, 44; postcolonial Africa, 83, 94, 98, 100, 102; postcolonial condition, 32, 87, 117, 189; postcolonial heterosexuality, 152, 153, 156, 162; postcolonial modernity, 134, 144; postcolonial studies, 23, 148, 149, 159, 165, 199, 203, 218n5; urban centers, 81; ways of reading difference, 10; in Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, 158; women’s writings, 8 postmodernism, 8–9, 46, 140, 161, 165, 203, 215n26 primitivism, 86, 113, 114, 131, 133, 136–37 queer desire: black queer women, 28; Kay as queer, 25; in Kay’s Bessie Smith, 19, 24; “queer” as used in this study, 218n12; queer time, 37–43; Sappho as queer, 230n3; Smith as queer, 26, 41

270 / index race: challenging how we conceive and read, 10; difference that gender makes for, 104; disturbs geographic and intimate routes, 38; and geography, 20; and history, 78; hypervisibility of, 66–67; as identity, 5, 25, 36; literary and cultural production in construction of, 4–5; making it strange and unfamiliar, 6–7; and modernity, 107, 108, 225n2; popular performances marked by, 50; racial dislocation, 94–95; racialized body, 96, 98; scientific racism, 61; as trauma, 83, 84, 105 Rainey, Ma, 28, 33, 45, 220n2 realism: versus aesthetic innovation, 8; on correspondence to ordinary world, 145, 148–49; feminist, 149, 228n5; of Head’s The Collector of Treasures, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 164; Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and, 14, 86, 87; magical (marvelous), 129, 137, 142, 144, 165, 168, 169, 170; of Melville’s The Migration of the Ghosts, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170–71, 172; Mullen on, 198–99; social, 4, 37, 216n30, 216n31; Western art as based on, 215n26; of Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, 159, 161, 162, 173 Richards, Deborah: aesthetics of, 63; cosmopolitan poetics of, 47; feminist poetics of, 74–75; on gaps between transmission of history and memory, 49; as guilty of trying to include everything, 4, 75, 204; “The Halle Berry One-Two,” 222n22; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; poetics of the body of, 45–46; strategy of, 48; ultimate strategy of, 76. See also Last One Out (Richards) Sappho, 180, 182, 183, 197, 230n3 Sharpe, Jenny, 48, 216n35, 219n20, 228n34 She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Philip), 188–98; affectual experience in, 179; “African Majesty” section, 190, 191; “Cyclamen Girl” section, 192; “Discourse on the Logic of Language” section, 192, 193–95; as encyclopedic, 180; “If not,” 207; “I” in, 179, 192; introduction to, 189, 231n9; “Lesson for the Voice” referenced in, 197; “magical parts” in, 198; as

nonnarrative epic, 16; paratactic style of, 199–200; structure and organization of, 191–93; “Universal Grammar” section, 196 slavery: abolition of slave trade, 77, 82, 93, 103; in Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost, 95–96, 97–98, 100, 101, 103; in Haiti, 111, 225n9; Middle Passage, 81, 95, 97, 130, 166, 183 Smith, Bessie: as creating her own world, 36; in diaspora’s intellectual routes, 23–24; “Downhearted Blues,” 18; gossip surrounding, 31–32; as heir apparent to Ma Rainey, 45; as icon, 24, 26–28, 29, 34, 36; in Kay’s Bessie Smith, 12, 21, 25, 26–39; in Kay’s “The Red Graveyard,” 24–25, 28; as queer, 26, 41 Smith, Trixie, 1, 2, 3, 6, 10, 39, 212n17 Spivak, Gayatri, 7, 48, 102, 145, 146, 152–53, 177, 199, 205, 210n8, 211n11, 214n24, 231n2 Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (Hurston), 110–22; asymmetry and critique of, 107, 118–22; on convivial relationship of colonizer and colonized, 141; diasporic affinities of, 14–15; feminism of, 110, 111, 112, 117–18, 120; mixed genre prose in, 110, 119; on modernity as entanglement of fear and desire, 140; possession in confrontation with black modernity, 108–9, 113–17; “Women in the Caribbean” section, 120, 121; on zombies, 117, 128 Third World Women, 142–74; aesthetics of accumulation and, 176; debate around, 143, 145, 177; in Head’s The Collector of Treasures, 150–57; in Melville’s The Migration of the Ghosts, 165–73; monolithic understanding denied, 15; in Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, 157–65 Thomas, Herbert, 44, 45, 75 tradition, 10–11, 108, 151 van Vechten, Carl, 31 Venus Hottentot, The (Alexander), 49–63; covers of, 53–54, 220n5; imagined classroom scenario in, 51; popular cultural figure used to remap genealogy

index / 271 of black corporeality, 13; sections of, 62. See also “Venus Hottentot (1825), The” (Alexander) “Venus Hottentot (1825), The” (Alexander): at axis of redress, 51–52; in construction of diaspora feminism, 53; date in title of, 49; first section, “Cuvier,” 55–58; formal constraints in, 61; interior logic of, 60; mobility of representation in, 76; poetics of accumulation in, 75; Richards’s “C’est l’amour” compared with, 73; second section, 58–62 Walcott, Derek, 80, 81–82, 102 Wicomb, Zoë: aesthetic project of, 163; David’s Story, 161, 162, 221n7, 229n11; on literacy, 210n8; mobile narrative techniques in, 144; occupies and renegotiates order of diaspora, 3; The One That Got Away, 158; on real world

school, 4; on revising realism, 145; strategic use of short story collection, 158. See also You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (Wicomb) women: “woman” as sign, 7. See also black women; feminism; Third World Women You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (Wicomb), 157–65; on act of writing, 143; ambivalent endings in, 158, 164; complex relationship between plot and sequence in, 12; on desire for connection, 147; on fractures and fissures in reality, 161–62; gender mapped in, 145–46; on microdiasporas, 163; narrative dissonance between sequencing and representations of gender in, 15; narrative transparency in, 157–58; on revisions of romance plots, 148; on stories, 173

About the Author

Samantha Pinto is Associate Professor of Feminist Literary and Cultural Studies in the English Department at Georgetown University.