As Honor Ford-Smith’s contemporary version of Nanny/“Ni’s” bottom suggests, this chapter also critiques attempts to move from the burden of visibility to a space of subjective interiority. In Ford-Smith’s imaginative rendering, poetics allow Nanny to both acknowledge and dismantle the narratives surrounding her historical tops and bottoms, engaging in a discourse of loneliness or longing for recognizable interaction with and in social and cultural narratives—“lovers or children or invented dreams”—to characterize this ambivalent critique. In taking up iconic cultural figures and forms, Alexander and Richards also take on this other “burden” of giving voice to the consciousness of their subjects. Both choose to expose this practice of representing interiority as an equally tempting and problematic surface, a narrative practice no less “invented” than colonialist representations of black women. As Jenny Sharpe articulates in her discussion of Nanny, to study iconic black women is a “paradox,” in that they are “the most prominent” but “also the most invisible in the archives” (2003, 1). Official narratives and historical records compete with oral tradition and post-Independence and Civil Rights referents. As several modern critics of race and aesthetics note, the two need not compete for “good” representations of black women’s bodies: Janell Hobson (2005) locates both ongoing trauma and aesthetic revaluing in the legacy of Baartman, for instance, while scholar Meta Jones sees an impulse in contemporary black women’s writing to “engage[] in a subversive revision of the black literary tradition” (2011, 7), adopting and remixing history simultaneously. Ford-Smith’s “Message from Ni” dramatizes this tension between narrative play and corporeal historical materialism, indicating that “surface,” like “bottom,” need not be read as irrelevant, negative, or something to get beyond/over but instead may be read as a critical space to inhabit. This chapter reads the formally challenging poetics of Alexander and Richards as attending to the gaps between the transmissions of history and memory in the black diaspora through the interactions between consequential bodies and the surfaces—the images, sounds, and texts—in which black women’s bodies are frequently and publicly remembered.
Bottoms Up(lift)!
The general “problem” of (late-capital) practices of reference is one of correspondence, between the linguistic sign and “any actual object,” as Linda Hutcheon articulates (1988, 143–44). But what can we make of poet Elizabeth Alexander’s use of diasporic reference, her postmodern recasting of nineteenth-century performer Saartjie Baartman, “The Venus Hottentot,” and her infamous bottom: “in this newspaper lithograph / my buttocks are shown swollen / and luminous as a planet” (1990, 5)? The surface of Alexander’s poem could be read as a correction of the referent or, at the very least, the reproduction of the shock of racial and sexual exploitation to right the historical representation—marked by the date in the poem’s full title, “The Venus Hottentot (1825).” But in choosing a date nearly ten years after Baartman’s documented death, Alexander’s referential world grows beyond the discipline of chronological history, into the realm of the posthumous power which references to race, gender, and sexuality signify. As the lines just quoted demonstrate, these excesses of historical reference include those circulated by print and empirical culture. And though Alexander’s poem speaks to modes of resistance, it dwells most frequently in lyric engagement with and in the bottom. If Baartman is a science experiment, she figures on a large scale; her most famous referent, her bottom, metaphorically corresponds to a poetic world of value unto itself, one infused with narratives of shame and inferiority as well as intellectual curiosity and cosmopolitan desires of and for diaspora engagement.4
Alexander’s iconoclastic method traces what critic Joseph Roach calls “genealogies of performance” (1996, 25) that engage in ongoing public histories and collective memory to garner and disrupt social power dynamics. From Ford-Smith’s imagined “children” to Alexander’s “imaginary / daughters,” the genealogy of the bottom contains a progressive promise not just of/for material or remembered bodies but for performances of the social imagination itself. As several transnational feminist theorists contemporary with Alexander have also marked, these imaginative progeny signify the relational quality of “histories” and representation. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (1997) name these convergences “feminist genealogies” and mark their “dislocations” as well as their diaspora presences. Connections between popular performances marked by the nexus of gender and race are not just “covered” but rewritten into the lineage of the aesthetic and intellectual practices of a diaspora feminism.
Such acts of genealogical engagement occupy a type of spatial relationship to Alexander’s poetics. As a critical frame, genealogy offers within the structure of “reproductivity,” or exhaustive knowledge of documented heterosexuality and inheritance that excluded blacks in the New World, a set of deconstructive acts in its quest for thoroughness, its inevitable uncovering and description of the bottoms of “illegitimate” diaspora connection (Mirza 1997, 5). In Alexander’s taking up of Baartman, she imagines the failures of colonial imagination in the construction of racial difference, the “bottoms” of Western racial discourse. “Bottom” implies hierarchy, a play of power not lost on Alexander, or on Joseph Roach in his formulation of the concept of genealogies of performance, which finds its roots in Foucault: “Genealogies of performance attend not only to ‘the body,’ as Foucault suggests, but also to bodies—to the reciprocal reflections they make on one another’s surfaces as they foreground their capacities for interaction” (1996, 25). Roach goes on to suggest that the concept can “also attend to ‘counter-memories,’ or the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (26).
Alexander’s work is instructive, then, in the same way that the bottom’s value itself operates—not as a site of reproduction but as a near reference to sex itself, in both proximity to primary sex characteristics and the site/sight of desire. As such, referencing the bottom points to its capacity as a recognizable sign. Its “vulgarity,” or its obviousness, aligns with what Carolyn Cooper recasts as a literacy of the body, a text of “popular taste” (1995, 5). To claim the bottom, for Alexander, is not just to claim the significance of working-class culture but to stage the kinesthetic “performance intelligence” of hypervisible bodies as “a graphic metaphor for alternative aesthetics” (Chatterjea 2004, 24, 19)—as a reference to both the training and typology that characterize the relationship between diaspora political consciousness and aesthetic practices. How those aesthetics are read by critics and by varying audiences is Alexander’s imagined classroom scenario, “swarming with cabbage-smelling / citizens who stare and query, / ‘Is it muscle? Bone? Or fat?’” (1990, 5). The bottom, too, has its interiority, inextricable from its materiality in Alexander’s rendering. The diasporic practices of representation employed by her poetry engage what Hutcheon calls “the yearning for order” not to find, finally, correspondence but instead to map the inquiry into race, gender, and diaspora itself (1988, 157). Rather than the “dominant markers” of self and other, “leaving and arriving,” that Sneja Gunew claims as the false idols of diaspora practice, the referencing of the bottom engages in “an endless process of traveling and change” (2004, 107).
Elizabeth Alexander’s body of work challenges, through various levels of engagement with black diaspora culture, a “limited imagination” of iconic figures, local cultures, and familial drama usually associated with blackness and its public circulation (2004, x). These contested signs of blackness, gender, location,