Difficult Diasporas

The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic

Samantha Pinto

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814771280
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2013 Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Study of Black American Literature

In this comparative study of contemporary Black Atlantic women writers, Samantha Pinto demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics in defining the relationship between race, gender, and location. Thinking beyond national identity to include African, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Black British literature, Difficult Diasporas brings together an innovative archive of twentieth-century texts marked by their break with conventional literary structures. These understudied resources mix genres, as in the memoir/ethnography/travel narrative Tell My Horse by Zora Neale Hurston, and eschew linear narratives, as illustrated in the book-length, non-narrative poem by M. Nourbese Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Such an aesthetics, which protests against stable categories and fixed divisions, both reveals and obscures that which it seeks to represent: the experiences of Black women writers in the African Diaspora. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist scholarship in her study of authors such as Jackie Kay, Elizabeth Alexander, Erna Brodber, Ama Ata Aidoo, among others, Pinto argues for the critical importance of cultural form and demands that we resist the impulse to prioritize traditional notions of geographic boundaries. Locating correspondences between seemingly disparate times and places, and across genres, Pinto fully engages the unique possibilities of literature and culture to redefine race and gender studies.

1. 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 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 aneċal 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 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 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 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 race-welding. . . . 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 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 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 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). Befo...