Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto

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 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 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 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 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