Difficult Diasporas. Samantha Pinto

metropolis, is an ideological practice, one that can succumb to what Caribbean writer and artist Wilson Harris names “the illiteracy of the imagination” (1999, 77).³⁰ The point of innovation, and of the noticeable tension between form and content in the texts studied here, is to reroute and retrain our reading practices and hence the existing order(s) of diaspora.³¹ In their aesthetic range, these texts break standard reading practices within and across disciplinary categories as well as the category of “black women’s writing” as it is canonized.

      Diaspora is here recognized and enacted as an “aesthetics of identity,” not just a politics to be narrated (Arana 2007, 2).³² Diaspora can then represent more than direct reference to the Black Atlantic’s elsewheres (Africa, the Caribbean, Black Britain), more than “the sum of the place we find ourselves” (Arana 2007, 3).³³ In this book’s geographical spread, it does not then attempt to reinforce the lines of nationalist comparativism. Instead, it looks across diaspora women writers’ form as a way to conceptually expose how “we work very hard to make geography what it is” (McKittrick 2006, xi) in relationship to race and gender.³⁴ This book instead reformulates diaspora through formal innovation—taking its unpredictable routes to imaginative, nonnarrative realization—in order to centralize gender beyond literal travel. Black women’s writing innovatively reimagines black women as subjects of diaspora, but it also performs a reconstruction of the possibilities of diaspora studies itself—and its historical coming up in the academy at the intersection of postcolonial, transnational feminist, and Black Atlantic ways of reading difference.³⁵ In this sense, this book takes up Rachel Lee’s call for women of color, broadly defined, to stop “haunting” the center and instead to claim what she calls “territory” in speaking to one another across difference in their aesthetic—and critical—forms (2002, 99).

      Like Trixie Smith’s song, Difficult Diasporas attempts to make visible and at the same time disorder a genealogy of black cultural production. The exuberant interrogations and displacements of fixed identitarian politics in Black Atlantic women’s formally experimental writing, art, and culture refuse stereotypical readings or affiliations around categories of difference. In unflinchingly reusing “the order of the stor[ies]” being told about and by and in the name of black women, this archive of largely neglected resources remakes the order of diaspora not just to “include” women but to constitutively challenge how we conceive and read for signs of race, gender, and transnational geographies, in literature and beyond its imaginative borders. These formally innovative texts threaten with their abstraction, their sometimes downright refusal to claim race or gender or “black women” in legible ways. Instead, their innovations of language, genre, and form suggest the potential futures of the field as yet unknown, as well as the revision of complicated histories of black women as subjects in and of the academy.

      Mapping Black Atlantic Feminist Aesthetics

      The experimental aesthetics showcased in Difficult Diasporas embody the irrecoverable, unevenly legible presence of the historical in twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations of race and gendered belonging—presences that draw from the well of an incredible variety of source material and that find resonances in unexpected, uncomfortable locations. The historical here does not explain as much as it fractures, fails, and/or erupts. Violating the temporality of historical context, the archive of this book also directly challenges the tradition-versus-modernity line that both diaspora and feminist studies has interrogated as not just problematic but the problem central to defining racial, gendered, and globalized difference.³⁶ Innovative reorderings of the materials of blackness in line with “tradition” argue not just for its simultaneity with the modern but for the critical necessity of thinking race, gender, and modernity as mutually constitutive phenomena, through the long tail of contact and capital. A large, if subtle, part of the construction of modernity was narrated and justified through gender and sexual difference—and the lingering effects of this undergirding pervade both Black Atlantic and transnational feminist studies in the very form of “women”—black, Third World, Western, and so on—that appear as “the worst victims and the redemptive agents of the postmodern condition” simultaneously (Dubey [on African-Americans] 2003, 8). These representations and critical strategies around representation seem to resist both diaspora and feminist studies’ relentless attempts at deconstruction.³⁷

      Through aesthetic innovation, Difficult Diasporas structures itself based on fronts of critical interest shared between diaspora and feminist studies. First and foremost, it reconsiders the primacy of location and the geography of bodies that often defines the former fields. Arguing that cultural flows are just as salient markers of “diaspora” as the migration of peoples, it tracks iconographies, art objects, and ideologies to create new networks of diaspora possibility beyond historically and geographically corresponding subjects. This move also shows in my methodology, drawing liberally from poststructuralist, deconstructionist, performance, and postcolonial theory as well as feminist, postcolonial, transnational, ethnic, and diaspora studies across regional and national traditions. In line with this project’s dislocation of the individual, historically coherent subject, it is also concerned with the often binary scripts that black women’s bodies occupy in diaspora studies (officially invisible, domesticated sites of trauma or its public, performative resistance) and in feminism (localized sites of economic and physical violence and/or collective romanticized, monolithic communities). These texts offer a tentative blueprint for considering the corporeal as necessarily containing both exploitative and progressive possibility, as they dwell in some of the most abject narratives and most innovative representations of black embodiment.

      Hence, the texts I collect in this innovative archive practice difficult descriptions of difference itself rather than provide definitions.³⁸ The individual chapters engage feminist and diaspora debates over each field’s comparative failures of coherence. The first two chapters challenge the most overdetermined strategies for representing black women in the diaspora: location and corporeality. The next two chapters consider two key conceptual terrains of diaspora and feminism, history and modernity, from an innovative black feminist standpoint. Finally, the last two chapters question the value of narrative itself in representing diaspora feminist practice, disordering both “diaspora” and “feminism” as recognizable objects in their innovative collections. These texts do not, of course, exhaust the resources of formally innovative black literature.³⁹ I focus on these particularly underrepresented texts in scholarship and teaching to make a distinct point about the wide gaps and absences in our curricular and canonical thinking around black women’s writing, as well as around diaspora and feminist studies at large.

      The paratactic, recombinant strategy of critical framing in Difficult Diasporas mirrors the fault lines it finds in a variety of mobile textual practices—for example, Deborah Richards’s Last One Out, with its layered text boxes, quotations from European travel narratives, and references to actress Dorothy Dandridge nested into a single poem or the unusually structured short story cycle/novella You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, with its singular narrator but large gaps in temporality and location. If poetry has long been the only scene for looking at poetics, this book also expands that terrain, thinking through the forms of prose from Jackie Kay’s mixed genre profile of Bessie Smith to Zora Neale Hurston’s uneven ethnography of the Caribbean, to the postmodern metatextual parts that make up Erna Brodber’s fragmented novel, to the complex relationships between plot and sequence that define the small-scale fictions of Bessie Head’s, Zoë Wicomb’s, and Pauline Melville’s collections. At the center of these prose and poetic negotiations lie both poetic interrogations of diaspora, in the form of nonnarrative collections and book-length lyrics, and perhaps the most critically neglected genre of black expression, experimental theater.

      Hence, I begin with Jackie Kay, a black Scottish writer of growing reputation, and the author of the Jazz-era transgender novel Trumpet, whose poetry and prose writing sit just outside the bounds of black recognition because of their focus on sexuality, transracial adoption, and Scottish culture. What happens when her liminal black experience comes into contact with what we might think of as a paradigmatic racial subject in the figure of blues singer Bessie Smith? How does someone who came to be and to know blackness outside of its normative boundaries—geographic, gendered, sexual, cultural—negotiate