Diasporic Women's Writing of the Black Atlantic

(En)Gendering Literature and Performance

Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Esther Álvarez López, Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Esther Álvarez López

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136657054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für weibliche Autoren

This book brings together a complete set of approaches to works by female authors that articulate the black Atlantic in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender. The chapters provide the grounds to (en)gender a more complex understanding of the scattered geographies of the African diaspora in the Atlantic basin. The variety of approaches displayed bears witness to the vitality of a field that, over the years, has become a diasporic formation itself as it incorporates critical insights and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, thus exposing the manifold character of (black) diasporic interconnections within and beyond the Atlantic. Focusing on a wide array of contemporary literary and performance texts by women writers and performers from diverse locations including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the US, and the UK, chapters visit genres such as performance art, the novel, science fiction, short stories, and music. For these purposes, the volume is organized around two significant dimensions of diasporas: on the one hand, the material—corporeal and spatial—locations where those displacements associated with travel and exile occur, and, on the other, the fluid environments and networks that connect distant places, cultures, and times. This collection explores the ways in which women of African descent shape the cultures and histories in the modern, colonial, and postcolonial Atlantic worlds.

Part I

Diasporic Materialities

I.1 BODY POLITICS

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1 Seeing Black and the
Color of Representation

Fo Wilson

What follows six is more than seven.

Yoruba proverb
—Rowland Abiodun,
“Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics:
The Concept of Ase” (1994, 69)

Black, a mysterious color or achromatic “non-color” as denned by some, can be associated with both: the sum total and absence of all colors; the absorption and absence of light; a void or an overpowering gravitational field like a black hole; as well as pejorative and positive connotations with race.¹ It is this complex constellation of formality and representation, metaphor and metonymy that informs the history and controversy in the very word. It is also the tensions between these dichotomies embedded in its meanings that persist in dialogues within a dynamic Black Atlantic and find residence in contemporary art of the African diaspora and much of the Western world.

Early in Paul Gilroy's 1993 classic about double consciousness and black representation in modernity, he notes,

The contemporary black English, like the Anglo-Africans of earliers generations, and perhaps, like all blacks in the West, stand between (at least) two great cultural assemblages, both of which have mutated through the course of the modern world that formed them and assumed new configurations. At present, they remain locked symbiotically in an antagonistic relationship marked out by the symbolism of colors which adds to the conspicuous cultural power of their central Manichean dynamic—black and white. These colors support a special rhetoric that has grown to be associated with a language of nationality and national belonging as well as the languages of ‘race’ and ethnic identity. (1–2)

Whereas he makes note of the dualism in language, symbolism and nationalism assumed within the colors black and white and their cultural representations, he also speaks to the messy, multifaceted creolization between cultures that he explores from the Black Atlantic viewpoint. In naming the conjunction between “the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the ‘Indians’ they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured” (1993, 2) as a porous and dynamic entity of cultural mutation, miscegenation, and hybridity, Gilroy identifies the Black Atlantic stream of that dynamic as a “counterculture.” In hindsight, perhaps it's not so counter at all and should be positioned as more central to the identity of Western modernity as a whole. If this history were written from the center point of this complex cultural conjunction, we would have many more viewpoints from which to unpack this narrative than the dominant view of Europe and the West. It would be a more interesting one, I might say, that could simultaneously hold contradictory revelations and further substantiate Gilroy's claims that culture and national identity are not as immutable as they might appear.

As an artist of African decent, I am simultaneously aware of the universality of my existence and the inescapable reality of my blackness and all its readings in contemporary culture. This double consciousness elaborated on by Gilroy and so poetically introduced into the Black Atlantic lexicon by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) describes a condition I have in common with many other creative minds that share dual or multiple identities within the bardo of contemporary life. In my work, I constantly modulate among my yearnings to express beauty through African American, African, and Western aesthetic value systems, the complexities of the human condition, and my blackness as denned by me and the whole of contemporary culture. This is a complex, demanding, and complicated position from which to participate in and contribute to society and the various communities I belong to. In my contribution to this volume, I discuss my work and issues around race and gender, identity, and representation that expose their complex intersections, and ask what one sees when one looks critically at the color black.

THE BLACK ATLANTIC VITALITY
IN WESTERN MODERNITY

It is not too much to argue that European modernity
manifested itself as a mirrored reflection of the mask of blackness.

—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
“European African Art and the Uncanny” (1999, 27)

As colonialism brought disparate cultures together in the latter part of the last millennium, it also brought a collision of worldviews and belief systems between Europe and Africa. It is not too hard to presume that Picasso and his contemporaries responded not only to what was, to them, a new aesthetic vocabulary as they encountered the African sculptures and masks they found at the flea markets in Paris and the Palais du Trocadero in the early part of the twentieth century, but also the strong spiritual presence found in these objects of power.

In her book Negrophilia: Avant-garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, historian Petrine Archer-Shaw speaks of appropriation in this way: “Paris's avant-garde artists were the first to co-opt black culture to promote their ideas about modernity” (2000, 51). She suggests that the embrace of what was to Europe the mysterious and exotic nature of African sculpture or l'art negre, as it became known, inspired rebellious Dadaists and other artists that were rejecting the conservatism in established European art and society. Cubist collaborator George Braque is quoted in Petrine Archer-Shaw's book as saying, “The African masks opened a new horizon to me. They made it possible for me to make contact with instinctive things, with uninhibited feeling that went against the false [Western] tradition, which I hated” (2000, 53).

Archer-Shaw argues that Paris's fascination with l'art negre was not on the margins, but deep within the genesis of modernist ideology. She cites as an example Paul Guillaume, a major Parisian avant-garde collector and promoter of traditional African sculpture as fine art. In 1918, he published Les Arts a Paris, and, with Guillaume Apollinaire, was one of the first to embark on a serious study of l'art negre and to promote its modernity. Guillaume published images of Fang masks from West African and popular Baule heads from Gabon, alongside other modern art by European artists. He contributed to elevating their status in European culture from mere ethnographic curiosities to important objects of art that still maintain a distinct status as signifiers and markers of particular significance in the formation of modern art. Guillaume, who gained respect as a connoisseur of African Art, contends that

[t]he modern movement in art gets its inspiration undoubtedly from African Art, and it could not be otherwise…. [S]ince Impressionism, no manifestation in art could be shown that is not African in essence. The work of young painters such as Picasso, Modigliani, Soutine, for example, is to an extent the work of African emotion in a new setting. In the same way, the sculpture of Archipenko, Lipschitz and Epstein is impregnated with Africanism. The music of Bernard, Satie, Poulenc, Auric, Honneger—in short all that is interesting since Debussy—is African. (Archer-Shaw 2000, 64)

That is a profound statement. If we accept the view that aspects of the African aesthetic contributed to the genesis of modern abstraction, then we are obliged to accept evidence of its lineage in the work of American Abstract Expressionists, who were influenced by European modernists. This begins to expand the notion of the Black Atlantic cosmology as something larger than itself.² Also consider that at the same time Abstract Expressionists were forging new directions in American art, African American musicians such as Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, and jazz expressionists such as Billie Holiday were innovating new directions in musical genres. Jazz musicians took the color black and painted music with it. Their originality acknowledged and amplified the magical silence and presence in between notes within Western technique to produce new musical innovations, as well as to rescue blackness from claims of not having the potential to make significant contributions to American culture.

This ability to give subjectively to the in-between—that which is not easily heard or seen—speaks to a particular African and African Ameri-can aesthetic. In speaking of the spiritual power in Tribal art, which Guil-laume promoted in France, historian William Fagg states, “Tribal cultures tend to conceive things as four-dimensional objects in which the fourth or time dimension is dominant and in which matter is only a vehicle, or the outward and visible expression, of energy or life force. Thus it is energy and not matter, dynamic and not static being, which is the true nature of things” (1995, 264).

Within 1940s America, and New York in particular, there was a conjunction among many in the intersections between art and culture where the Black Atlantic presence, although not always acknowledged in history, played a significant role in the creative life of both blacks and whites alike. Perhaps in no other period in American art has the color black played such a significant role in the aesthetic and conceptual life of artists as in the work of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists. These artists, primarily painters, and those most celebrated, primarily white and male, focused a significant amount of their practice and work entertaining the formal, social, intellectual, and complex metonymies of blackness. Among Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning was African American painter Norman Lewis. In Lewis and his contemporaries, we find wonderful examples of what black can be and signify.

Lewis claims his first forays into using black in his paintings started with a formal investigation painting rhododendrons. “I used just black—to convey the form—and I liked that and I went on to try to do other things. Just manipulating the paint was exciting to me” (Gibson 1998, v 12). It must have been a challenge for Lewis to negotiate between the dual realities of being a black man and an artist at that time in New York. Revolutions in painting were influencing the international art scene, important social movements were on the rise, and significant innovations in music by black contemporaries were developing as well. Lewis, who quite possibly took inspiration from the innovations in jazz in his work Blending, says of what he was trying to achieve, “Just as dissonance in music can be beautiful, certain arrangements in color have the same effect. The picture in Utica is a black picture…. I wanted to see if I could get out of black the suggestion of other nuances of color, using it in such a way as to arouse other colors” (Bearden and Henderson 1993, 321). This inclination to strip away meaning, to turn paint into the subject of painting, was an idea advanced by his contemporaries and influential critics of the time. Abstract Expressionism offered American artists a freedom from the confines of naturalism and the chance to develop individual and personal aesthetic theories about their own artistic production. Ad Reinhardt, one of Lewis's closest associates among the New York School, proposed an objective that identifies the goals of the movement. “We have eliminated the naturalistic, and among other things, the supernaturalistic, and the immediately political… . Yourre putting in everything about yourself, but not everything outside yourself” (Gibson 1997, xxiv).

Prior to the Artist Sessions at Studio 35, which Lewis took part in and from which Reinhardt's statement came, influential critic Clement Greenber's 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” and later Harold Rosenber's idea of “action painting,” gave legitimacy to machismo ideas that stressed a physical and formal virility in painting. Rosenberg says in his landmark essay “American Action Painters” in the 1952 Art News, “The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from value—political, aesthetic, moral” (Rosenberg 1994, 30). For Lewis, Abstract Expressionism might have been potentially viewed as liberation of another kind. With a revolution in painting in such close proximity, Lewis might have been trying to capitalize on a unique opportunity to liberate himself and his creativity from the confines of what black had come to mean in a social context in mid-century America.

Although these ideas largely denned this group of artists, it must have presented an uneasy tension for Lewis in his “twoness.” As an artist who like many others wanted to be accepted by and work within the philosophical framework of his mainstream peers, he was also a black man familiar with the cloak of blackness he was unable to discard that deferred to race and the time's inequities. Lewis might have been trying to seize a unique opportunity to liberate himself and his creativity from the confines of what black had come to mean socially. Yet, he might have found that liberation within the aesthetic context of blackness ironically still confined him to what he might have been trying to escape. Formal in his public philosophies, Lewis was decidedly political in his personal ideology. As one example, as a member of the Harlem Artist Guild founded by Augusta Savage, who played an important role in Lewis's artistic beginnings, he encouraged other artists to be active in protesting Works Projects Administration (WPA) cutbacks that he knew would affect black artists disproportionately.

Even after completing abstract works that referenced political and social concerns in their titles like America the Beautiful (1960) and Klu Klux (1963), which present obvious commentary on the country's inherent contradictions, Lewis sticks to a formal philosophical reasoning for his work. “I am not interested in an illustrative statement that merely mirrors some of the social conditions…. Political and social aspects should not be the primary concern: esthetic ideas should have preference” (Siegel 1966, 48–49).

Jorge Daniel Veneciano feels that disparities between Lewis's formal philosophies and his social conscience do not necessarily contradict each other. He cites Thomas Lawson's views as evidence that there is room to read political statements in Abstract Expressionism that do not function to promote social imperatives. Lawson, who put together Lewis's first retrospective in 1976, said that “Norman Lewis was a political artist making political, though not propagandistic, art” (quoted in Veneciano 1998, 32). Veneciano feels that

Lewis's comments do not contradict [Lawson's] idea. Rather his paintings cleave a space for this type of strategy from within the practical rigors of Abstract Expressionism. Therefore it is not necessary to argue that the subject matter of the black paintings involves social comment or protest. One can say that their subject matter concerns form, color, line and gesture. These formal qualities, however, are not devoid of the capacity to signify relevancies of human-cum-social experience. If they were, they would be inexplicable, and would risk going unnoticed or unremarked. (1998, 32)

Veneciano's remarks give credence to the idea that there are multiple and simultaneous readings that one could surmise from Lewis's work and that of the Abstract Expressionists, as well as larger complex issues related to understanding the metonymy inherent in interpretations and use of the color black.

Layered in Lewis's work is also the idea of visibility and invisibility as many, like Veneciano, attest. Not unlike the poignant irony of being con-strained by this simultaneous paradox that Ralph Ellison employs in his classic work Invisible Man (1952), w...