1. The World and the âJarâ: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora
A letter full of curses, again in Bessieâs handwriting to the manager of the 91 Club in Atlanta. An original record of âDownhearted Blues.â 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: âNorthern bitch. Long goody. Sweet Mama String Bean. 1922.â . . . A jar of Harlem night air.
âJackie Kay, Bessie Smith
Bessie Smithâs first hit, 1923âs âDownhearted Blues,â tells a familiar blues story of love and loss using the strange and fantastic metaphor of âthe world,â âa jug,â and âthe stopperâ: âGot the world in a jug, the stopperâs in my hand / Got the world in a jug, the stopperâs in my hand / Going to hold it, baby, till you come under my command.â 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 songsâ engagement with âloveâ often exposes decidedly unpopular narratives of power and loss. In âDownhearted Blues,â 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, âThe World and the Jugâ: âBut 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 thereâ (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 âsociology-oriented criticsâ (108). Ellisonâs use of the popular lyric as the metaphor he borrows for his title connects the articulation of romantic desire in a classic blueswomanâs song to the stifling insistence on social realism as the model for reading black expression and discourse. In this chapter, I take Ellisonâs 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 Kayâs work on Bessie Smith.
This chapter engages Bessie Smith, poet and novelist Jackie Kayâs 1997 book-length profile of the blues singer, to begin to address this question, first and foremost by performing a literal gloss of the âworldâ; I examine how Smithâs and Ellisonâs articulation of the paradoxes of power and black subjectivity relate to Kayâs decidedly broad geographical and historical spreadânineteen-sixties Scotland, early twentieth-century American South, nineteen-twenties Harlem, contemporary England. This immense and surprising âworldâ of the black diaspora interacts with the portability of the âjarââKayâs version of Smith and Ellisonâs jugâas 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 Kayâs 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 aneÄal evidence, fictional scenarios, and autobiographical reflection rendered in various typefaces within each chapter). Kayâs revaluation of Bessie Smithâs and her own relationship to âthe worldâ of the black diaspora through her text exposes the overlaps and incommensurabilities found in various circulating models of black womenâs identity in Ellisonâs sense of the juglike lens of critical discourse.
Reading Kayâs 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 womenâs popular performances within the genealogy of diaspora studies as an intellectual project. Kayâs text takes on the specific role of differenceâsexual, gendered, geographic, and racialâwithin Smithâs 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 âmake visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographicâ (2006, x). Pushing this politics of location further, I argue that Kayâs 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 Kayâs 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, Kayâs 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 womenâs 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 Jackâs motherâs house on 132nd Street between Fifth and Lenox Avenues. Above 132nd Street was a Harlem full of black people.
âJackie Kay, Bessie Smith
In a text that travels incessantlyâfrom 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 fictionâJackie Kayâs 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 âsense that certain venues are more authentic than othersâ 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 Gilroyâs 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 âjar of Harlem night air,â 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 âdisappearedâ in the nineteen-fifties, long after Smithâs deathâan 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 Harlemâs 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 âjar,â as opposed to the weight of Smith and Ellisonâs âjug,â is a moment of textual whimsy and license on Kayâs part. âA Harlem full of black peopleâ is a concrete, historical mark, a location âfull ofâ racial significance and signification. While the latter has obvious implications for this chapterâs concern with the consequences of gender and class in the way we conceive of the âspaceâ of the black diaspora, this section also takes up Harlemâs more ethereal strains that circulate with a difference in Kayâs 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 âThe New Negro,â Alain Lockeâs 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 isâor promises at least to beâa race capital. ([1925] 1992, 7)
Here, Locke is doing the intellectual work of making Harlem a racial symbol, âfull ofâ 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 âinstance,â a âfirstâ of potentially many, or later, a âpromiseâ of the future. As example or model, Lockeâs Harlem wants to be accessible, a representative of pending communities and âNew Negroâ subjects around the worldâa race capital, not the only one. But it is also exceptionalâthe âlargest,â the experimental site of New Negro formation, the laboratory. As both template and a break from the mold, Lockeâs work to rhetorically produce and locate Harlem as ârace capitalâ also hails a certain elemental population as representative group. He relies on the word âmanâ four times in his exhaustive catalogue of Harlemâs 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 ârace capitalâ 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 Kayâs imagined catalogue, is distinctly about a different set of aesthetic and popular practicesâthe ânightlifeâ of Harlem, its clubs and balls and scenes. This ânight workâ of Harlem is its romantic currency, more what we think of as the substance of Kayâs jar and Smithâs lyrics and as opposed to the âday workâ of intellectually drawing on what is kept in that jar. In other words, Lockeâs âHarlemâ is the critical work that certifies intellectual and historical significance. But what circulates most prominently as the popular âideaâ 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, âfathers,â including Locke, Frantz Fanon, AimĂ© CĂ©saire, and LĂ©opold Senghor, whereas essayist and author Jessie Fauset is considered a âmidwifeâ 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 diasporaâanthologies, print culture, and even reprinted literature.
In a more contemporary moment, developments in US black feminist theory around womenâs 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 Lockeâs gauntlet, his gesture toward the cosmopolitan makeup of Harlem as location and symbol, is one that galvanizes the three major categories of timeâthe past (âthe first concentration in historyâ), the present (âNegro life is seizingâ), and the future (Harlem âpromises to beâ the center of New Negro citizenship). His challenge to this ânewâ 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, Lockeâs challenge has been taken up by critics such as Brent Edwards, who challenges this gendered omission in suggesting that âa nascent feminismâ and feminist intellectual project was at the center of black internationalismâs discursive and practical formation. Edwardsâs suggestion of a systemic approach to diaspora through feminist thought is one that potentially considers the gendered âpracticeâ 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 Smithâs significance to the intellectual projects of Ellison and Kay, where can we locate her work in the context of diasporaâs 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 CĂ©saire 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 âsaw 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 renaissanceâ (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 âconsciousâ 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 McKayâs 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 âwork.â Like the attempt to render Harlem as the portable essence suggested by Kayâs jar, the romanticization of blues traveling becomes reified, located in Harlem but exportable in conceptual work. Kay strategically uses this affective register of âthe embodied practices of black performance and spectatorshipâ 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 âQ seriesâ of queer biographies of prominent cultural figures, Kayâs profile engages those romantic and celebratory modes mentioned earlier in its construction of Smith as an icon.7 But Kayâs text does not start in Harlem, nor anywhere near a âcenterâ of black culture. Formally, it begins with a poem from Kayâs sequence on Smith in 1993âs Other Lovers, âThe Red Graveyard.â The poem begins and ends with a four-line, standard blues refrain on Bessie Smithâs haunting transatlantic cultural presence. But this frame, like Harlem, contains a surprisingly memoirish center. The substance of the five contained stanzas is the narratorâs personal experience of the blues, of listening to Bessie Smith. At its center lies a stanza ruminating not on Smithâs voice but on Kayâs motherâs Scottish lilt. The description is comprehensive, another catalogue like Lockeâs, and the longest stanza of the poem:
My motherâs 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 motherâs voice pushes against the lolling resonance of the speakerâs own action in engaging in Bessie Smithâs black image: âI pick up the record cover. And now. This is slow motion. / My hand swoops, glides, swoops againâ (8). Befo...