African Diaspora and the Metropolis

Reading the African, African American and Caribbean Experience

Fassil Demissie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415560344
• eBook ISBN: 9781317988045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

At the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century, a number of African American and Caribbean intellectuals and immigrants of the African Diaspora with all their apprehensions set out in steamships en route and carried with them a certain presence to the metropoleis of Europe and North America. These individuals traversed the "middle passage" in the opposite direction from the forced journey undertaken by their enslaved ancestors. Later they began to arrive in large numbers as free men and women in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Brussels, Lisbon, New York, and other places in the metropolis by steam ships and later by planes, and were actors in the larger history of empire from which the imperatives of forced migration, uprooting, displacement, and exile had arisen.

The texts selected offer critical examination of a broad range of African Diaspora experiences in the metropole drawn from Senegal, the Caribbean, United States, Britain, Nigeria and France. Bringing together comparative and diasporic perspectives, the book explores the complex roles that race, gender, sexuality and history have played in the formation of African Diaspora identities in the metropole since the 19th century.

This book was published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal.

Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and the structure of Black metropolitan life

Mpalive-Hangson Msiska
School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK

Introduction

In 1956 and whilst living in London, Sam Selvon (1923-1994), a Trinidadian writer, published a novel whose portrayal of 1950s London has come to be seen as one of the most penetrating studies of the structure of Black metropolitan identity in London (Gikandi 1996, Procter 2000, 2003, Innes 2002, Macleod 2004). The ontological structure of Black metropolitan subjectivity offered in Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) is admittedly historically contingent, to the extent that it documents the period soon after the Second World War. However, in as much as its theoretical insights into the nature of Black subjectivity in a predominantly White metropolis is in part evident in writing preceding the novel as well as that subsequent to it, it can be argued that it has a resonance well beyond its immediate historical and no less so geographical setting. Indeed, I would contend that, its specificity notwithstanding, its insights can be usefully extended to the study of Black metropolitan life in other Western countries as well. It is a work that has always remained contemporary. The novel elaborates Black metropolitan identity as a dialectical tension between the utopic and diastopic view of the metropolis. The resolution of that tension is not straightforward and reveals the complexity of the formation of Black subjectivity in the metropolis.

London as a metropolitan habitation of the Black subject has captured the imagination of writers since the eighteenth century, most notably, Equiano in his famous The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789 [2001]) which, in addition to its central critique of slavery and its passionate plea for its abolition, offers us insights into the everyday experience of eighteenth-century Black Londoners, especially revealing their often difficult, but also varied social experience, as well as their sense of solidarity, small in number as they were then. A few of them worked in Central London, as servants, hairdressers and musicians, mostly. Equaino’s narrative depicts their common struggle to find a place within the metropolis. Indeed, it has been argued that William Shakespeare’s Othello was, in part, inspired by the presence of Black people in sixteenth-century London. Be that as it may, it is really with Equaino’s account that we begin to get a palpable sense in literary and biographical representation of what it meant to be a Black metropolitan dweller of a large Western city.

In Equaino’s autobiography, there is a discernible shift of representational perspective, as it is the Black metropolitan subject himself who offers us the vantage point from which to read his historical and social location within the metropolis. Indeed, the narrative offers us glimpses into Equaino’s interaction with various layers of British society, from the lower classes to the aristocracy, with some of the latter acting specifically as sponsors of the publication of his book, as he struggles from being an emancipated slave to an independent thinker and writer who not only celebrates his own freedom, but also seeks to end the institution of slavery itself and redeem those still in bondage. Equaino’s narrative presents the London metropolis as simultaneously a site of subjection and liberation. A similar perception of the city underpins Princes’s nineteenth-century narrative, A History of Mary Prince (1831 [1987]). Prince, a married woman, was forcibly brought from Bermuda to London by a cruel master, but later managed to escape his clutches and established herself as an abolitionist through the anti-abolition movement, authoring the story of her life, which became the first published narrative by a formerly enslaved Black woman, showing, among others, how metropolitan London itself was inextricably linked to the international transatlantic Slave Trade. Like Equaino’s tale, it is a narrative about the metropolis as a place of possible contraction of identity as well as where the feudal social relations of the West Indian slave plantation economy are undermined, as the enslaved subject is offered a space in which to cast off her subjection and forge a new identity for herself and, in exemplary fashion, finding a new voice for herself and a language of self-representation for her community.

Indeed, these early accounts, in some profound ways reveal aspects of Black metropolitan subjectivity that have endured across centuries. For instance, the notion that the city is a place of freedom from the narrow social and political constraints of the place of origin, Africa or the West Indies, is still evident in the way the city is imagined and represented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black British writing, such as Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. Equiano gives a poignant example of how a friend, a freeman like himself and whom he had helped get a job as a chef on a ship in London was kidnapped by his former master when the ship was in port in St Kitts, the West Indies. According to Equiano:

When the poor man arrived in St. Kitts, he was, according to custom, staked to the ground with four pins through a cord, two on his wrists, and two on his uncles and was cut and flogged most unmercifully and afterwards loaded cruelly with irons about his neck. I had two moving letters from him, when he was in this situation.

(Equiano [1789] 2001, p. 137)

It is in such a context that London and Britain come to signify a contrasting form of Diasporic subjectivity for Equiano, the idea of Diaspora as the space of liberation rather than as of incarceration and bondage. If Stuart Hall conceives of Black British identity as a Double Diasporasation (Hall 1990), particularly in relation to subjects of Caribbean origin, then one can argue that this second Diaspora is here imagined and figured as the promise of freedom, unlike the earlier one, from African to the Caribbean, that had been enforced and in which there was no room for the migrant to assert his or her agency in terms of choice of destination. By contrast, the second Diaspora is marked by the degree to which it expresses the choice to relocate on the part of the Black subject. Of course, London has also been home to African and Caribbean political refugees — that should not be overlooked, but nevertheless, with regard to the 1950s, most of the migrants came to Britain exercising the international right of movement. It is also debateable how much choice people of Equaino's period had, as the threat of re-enslavement always remained high, as evident from his own account of life then. It is also worth pointing out that this positive view of the metropolis was common among enslaved African-Americans of the nineteenth century who saw the urban North in America as representing a place of greater freedom than the Southern plantation states. This is very much a conception of the metropolis as a utopia. This vision of the metropolis will be repeated later in the post-war immigration to Britain by those from the West Indies and Africa as seen in The Lonely Londoners. London will be perceived as a place where one's quest for cultural and economic plenitude can be amply fulfilled. Of course, as in the time of Equiano, the dream is not always realised in the case of the new arrivals, showing how a certain structure linked to the Black subject's experience of metropolitan London repeats itself, albeit with a difference across different historical periods.

However, it needs to be acknowledged, both for historical accuracy as well as for comparative purposes, that the idea of the metropolis as redemptive is not only limited to the Black experience of the city, a particularly racialised or ethnicised experience of the metropolis. Indeed, this notion was very much at the heart of the nineteenth-century European artists’ vision of the modern city. For the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, for instance, the city provided a new identity defined by a certain cosmopolitanism that took pleasure in the difference and variation that the city as a space provided, both in terms of the mingling of different social classes, as well as in the various physical sensations the urban architecture and landscape offered. Above all, for him, it was in the city that a new subject, an embodiment of the aristocratic chivalry of former times and a particularly modern disregard of and even disgust for tradition, was both fashioned and performed as a new heroic ideal in keeping with the city as a particular historical cultural formation. In his The Painter of Modern Life (1863 [1964]), Baudelaire describes this new metropolitan subject as the protagonist of modernity:

Whether these men are nicknamed exquisites, incroyables, beaux, linones or dandies, they all spring from the same womb; they all partake of the same characteristic quality of opposition and revolt, they are representative of what is finest in human pride of that compelling need, alas only too rare today, of combating and destroying triviality.

(p. 28)

Thus, for Baudelaire, this was homo metropolis per excellence. It was this new subject that the city yielded into the world, fashioned into a paradigmatic subject of the new metropolitan formation, functioning as a subject of transition as well as the future — a living revolt against the very feudal values on which part of his constitution was predicated. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that Dandyism has historically also been a mode of expression of Black metropolitan subjectivity.

Joseph Johnson, an early nineteenth-century professional beggar presented by John Thomas Smith in his book Vagabondiana (1817) as wearing an elaborate hat in the shape of a ship and a carrying a walking stick was perhaps one of the early examples of how Black people appropriated aspects of dominant Western metropolitan subjectivity to fashion new modes of Being (Dawes 1999, p. 18). Dawes argues that Johnson, 'literally wore the badge of his immigrant status — his sense of alienation and difference — on his head' (Dawes 1999, p. 18). Johnson embodied the trope of Dandyism as simultaneous identification and counteridentification with the dominant and hegemonic social and political imaginary. That sense of subversive Dandyism, working as a protocol of what Bhabha (1994) has termed mimicry, the subordinate subject’s transgressive imitation of the dominant identity, is very much evident in Johnson’s self-production as a nineteenth-century Black Londoner. He may have been lonely, perhaps, like Selvon’s characters in The Lonely Londoners, but nevertheless chose to wear his loneliness with some style whose very extravagance would foreground his location in the metropolis not as an accident, but as a product of the metropolis’ invisible links to the transnational capitalism based on the Slave Trade.

In this, he foregrounds the real social relations underpinning the Black presence in Britain (Dawes 1999, pp. 18-19): Britain's role as the hub of an economic empire, whose affluence is not only dependent on the productive labour of others, the enslaved or colonised, produces new cultural and material desires in subjects on the periphery of its formation. It can also be argued that by carrying the ship on his head, asserting the particular mode of his transportation to the metropolis and to the West generally rather than his skin colour as his badge of metropolitan identity, he was metonymically shifting his location from the discourse of race to that of the political economy of his identity, to his and the city's location in what Gilroy (1993) has termed the Black Atlantic. By this method, Johnson universalises the motivation of his desire to belong to the city: shown as not particular, but one which over the centuries brought many from the British provinces, the Continent and other parts of the world to the London metropolis. It is in this regard that he can be seen as the precursor of Sam Selvon's Galahad of The Lonely Londoners who celebrates the materialism of the city, with the enthusiasm of a Dandy and the flaneur, of which, he is the new reincarnation. Galahad, is in this respect, as much a descendant of Johnson's Black Dandyism as of Baudelaire nineteenth-century European 'man of the city', an inheritor of a particularly Black metropolitan identity as well one that is transcultural and supra-ethnic.

Nevertheless, it is by positioning the metropolitan Black subject and the metropolis itself within the political economy that both Johnson and his fictional counterpart Galahad can be seen as historicising the city, unveiling its transcultural, if not transnational web of networks which accord it its status as a particular habitation in relation to other spaces, be they provinces, colonies or, internally, provinces. What is highlighted here is the extent to which London’s metropolitan identity is defined relationally, historically and transnationally. It is within such coordinates and their collective and diverse intersection in the formation of London as a metropolis that one should place and read the African and Black Diaspora in the city, as well as the Western metropolis generally.

For Benjamin (1983), however, Baudelaire was in fact charting the evolution of various urban personality types, including the Boheme and the Dandy as they were evolving from expressions of eighteenth-century aristocratic decadence and coalescing into that of the flaneur, the man of the city crowd, the typical modern urban dweller. Benjamin saw the flaneur as the quintessential subject of the new urban formation, a man who revels in being on the street and mingling with a variety of unknown people, without fear, but, if anything, with absolute pleasure. He describes this new subject of the city as someone who turns ‘the boulevard into an interieur’ (Benjamin 1983, p. 37). According to Benjamin, ‘the Street becomes a dwelling for the flaneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen in four walls’ (Benjamin 1983, p. 37). Nevertheless, within the metropolis’s immanent transculturalism of historical and material formation, the figure of the flaneur, just as that of his predecessor, the Dandy, have not usually been read in ways that easily extend to the African and Black inhabitants of the metropolis.

Benjamin's view of the flaneur is not only Eurocentric, but as Feminists such as Bowlby (1985) have argued, also palpably gendered, with no room for the equivalent female subject, the flaneuse. If feminism has sought to open up this urban ontological space to the excluded female subject, African and Black post-colonial cultural studies must equally extend it to the Black subject so that the discourse of metropolitan life and experience becomes racially inclusive, not simply as a matter of political equality, but of historical veracity and theoretical rigor. For in the final analysis all metropolitan subjects, regardless of race, and indeed gender, are primarily shaped and determined by the forces of the city. It is now believed by some historians that the Black presence in Europe and indeed London has a much longer history than usually conceived (Edwards 1985, pp. 50-51). So, if we are to produce a better understanding of metropolitan identity and in a manner that takes into account the fact that first and foremost, Black Londoners are metropolitan subjects, then the general metropolitan existential typologies that mainstream sociology has generated must be equally app...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abstracts
• An introduction
• 1 Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and the structure of Black metropolitan life
• 2 Richard Wright and African francophone intellectuals: a reassessment of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers in Paris
• 3 American philanthropy and African education: African students in the metropolis in the 1960s
• 4 'In my Senegalese quality and as a compatriot': Senegalese students in the metropolis and the language of affinity, 1880-1890
• 5 Paradoxes of diaspora, global identity and human rights: the deportation of Nigerians in Ireland
• 6 Pulling the coat: postcolonial performativity in Black British women's drama
• 7 From mirage to image: Africa on film in the metropolis, 1955-1975
• Index