The scene of identification imagines Kay’s close, intimate contact with the image of Smith as having the ability to violate and transform the borders of historical, national, racial, sexual, and geographic space, all within the interiority of a private home. The souvenir as metaphor for the experience of the black diaspora, then, also embodies the constant “failure” of the object to add up, to fill up or complete the experience of blackness. Instead, Kay narrates the repetitive contact between the subject of the black diaspora and her thwarted desire for a more coherent understanding of her diasporic belonging and marginalization at the same time. Kay “desire[s] souvenirs of events that are repeatable,” against Stewart’s reading (1984, 135), in that the trauma of black transatlantic history embodies exceptional pain and the repetitive infliction of that pain.19 In other words, Kay fetishizes Smith as a souvenir as much for her exceptionalism as for her representativeness. Kay’s engagement with the souvenirs of diasporic legacy posits the simultaneous distance and intimacy of that recurring memory and the aesthetic responses to it that have made up modern black cultural production.
To close this consideration of new pathways of diasporic cultural flows, I now return to Harlem as site and as “nostalgic myth” (Stewart 1984, 133). Late in Bessie Smith, Kay reimagines “gossip” surrounding Smith’s exploits, in her chapter “Tales of the Empress.” In particular, she re-creates the scene of a 1928 party hosted by Carl van Vechten, noted Harlem Renaissance patron and a member of the white cultural elite. Kay’s mode, as usual, is fierce identification with Smith herself:
Heard tell about 1928. The Empress arrives with Porter Grainger, the composer of her current show, Mississippi Days, dressed up to the nines in ermine and dripping with jewels. Right aways she realizes she is on alien territory. There’s a whole sea of white faces staring at her and the polite white handshake of van Vechten is no comfort. She is out of her depth, and she sure as hell is not going to drown. Whenever the Empress is out of her own territory, she defends herself with her own aggression. (1997, 104)
The “tale” goes on to tell of Smith knocking down van Vechten’s white wife after a patronizing request for a good-bye kiss from the blues singer. In another text, and even in the context of Kay’s no-fault portrait of Smith, this episode would seem par for the course—celebrating a blueswoman’s bawdiness, her “difference” from white culture and codes of behavior, her rebellion against even the subtle racial and gendered limits of dominant culture. The portrait of Smith is of the resisting-victim variety—certainly not a new form for black literature. But couched as it is in Kay’s own location as the only black face among a sea of white ones, including her parents, in a nation that is “alien territory” for easily recognizable blackness, this aneċe potentially tells a different story of the locations of blackness. Kay longs for black identifications and familiarity within the confines of her immediate, white-identified space. Her textual persona does not revolt but rather locates a space in her parents’ house, in her best friend’s box bedroom, to experience blackness differently. Smith’s reaction may be an act of displaced desire, but it is also Kay’s suggestion of the limits even of recognizably black and white experience, the limits of a small apartment in a city and time “full of” blackness.
The box bedroom and the grand arc of imaginary diaspora geographies suggested in this section begin to expand the ways we might think of space and location in the frame of the black diaspora. The transurban centers that define Black Atlantic exchange—Harlem, London, Paris, Port-au-Prince, and so on—remain key destinations but are decentered as sources in Kay’s profile and as the most meaningful sites of production.20 But Kay also refuses a retreat to “the local” as characterized by antimodern, romanticized representations of the folk in African American criticism, on the one hand, or the homogeneous indigeneity of the developing world in the case of some transnational feminist constructions. Instead, Bessie Smith asks, “What does a girl from Bishopbriggs near Glasgow know about Chattanooga?” (1997, 17) and assumes a collection of circulating objects of “research,” a popular culture archive, if you will, of songs, an atlas, a biography of Billie Holiday, a bottle of Coca-Cola, that informs that exchange (17–19). Her invocation of sources is, as nonfiction goes, uneven at best; but it is not a thoroughness that Kay is after but an ethereal itinerary, with pins stuck in the places—past, present, and future—that diaspora routes might travel, even unexpectedly.
Kay’s structural project in Bessie Smith destabilizes Harlem as the center of a map of black culture, aesthetics, and intellectual practice but more importantly reimagines what it (could) mean to evoke diaspora as a method and as an analytical category founded on the notion of mass migration of peoples from one place to another. On a critical scale, diaspora studies has privileged travel as perhaps the defining characteristic of subaltern subjectivity, of the postnational, postcolonial condition. If space is usually centered in such discourses in terms of geography and borders, Kay takes up the mobile object as center instead—not just the live body but also the image, the circulation which extends past that body but is no less material than Harlem itself or Kay’s metaphorical jar. The key to such alternate figurations of objects and difference lies partially in Fred Moten’s provocative statement that “the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (2003, 1). Whether it is the found album or the recovered stories of Bessie Smith as cultural icon, Kay’s text emphasizes the possibility of the object in resisting master narratives of meaning and capitalist value (ibid., 9–10). The key to alternate readings lies in the object’s frame. For Kay, the trope of the unusual frame, or the black cultural object showing up in a variety of racially coded locations, including her own text, points not to the resistant object itself as much as how its frame takes both Kay and the reader out of the assumed circuits of African diaspora circulation.
First and foremost, Kay’s unusual frame is Black British, or Scottish, to be exact, in comparison to the (African) American South. Claiming only the refrain from a popular song as reference, Kay vividly imagines a fairly stock vision/version of the South. Touching the atlas, her narrator starts with negation: “Well, it wasn’t like Glasgow. It wouldn’t be like anywhere I had been” (1997, 16). Blackness, for Kay’s exceptional Scottish black diaspora experience, is a series of external, Americanized references—a cinematic Western, an atlas, a series of song lyrics. That blackness registers as paradigmatically American, rooted in the folk of the South at the cusp of the great migration, is not surprising given the late-capital centrality of that narrative’s dispersal in cultural flows. It is also not surprising for the Black British context, in which “black” as an identity and a community struggles to find visibility in the multicultural state—a difficulty most famously reported by Gilroy’s infamous title, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (1991). The cultural production of Black British citizens, who do not discursively figure in the national imaginary, signals not just to nostalgic home communities but to global connections to the most powerfully identified community of black creative and intellectual production, African American culture.
But even as large portions of Bessie Smith traffic in this seemingly one-way global economy, Kay’s text interrupts the process by figuring American blacks as curious and creative about places outside of that “river” of American black folk culture. Kay constructs this through imagined contact with the aforementioned lost trunk, negotiated through Smith’s sisters: “Before they died, Tillie and Viola sent it on a ship headed for Scotland. They had seen pictures of Scotland and liked the look of the country, those big goddam mountains” (1997, 57). Shipping the archive away from recognizable blackness, Kay imagines that infamous trunk filled with three and a half pages’ worth of black commodity culture, from “Ma Rainey’s gold fillings” to a Cadillac steering wheel to documentation of death and marriage (60). The search for black history is material and embodied (baby teeth) as much as it is ephemeral (the air in the jar)—and the inorganic sits next to the natural, much as the radical break of emigration leaves Black British identity uneasily and unevenly in proximity to British colonial ideology. Kay’s injection of Scotland into the imaginary of the black South, the reverse route, and her desire to locate the archive of the blues outside of the major ports of the Black Atlantic, is also her bid to map black international and intellectual practice, as well