Thanks to the Harry Ransom Center, particularly to Molly Schwartzburg and Gabby Redwine, my chapter on Adrienne Kennedy is that much stronger, and I have got many future texts to study. The University of Texas at Austin gave me invaluable leave time in the home stretch of manuscript revisions. The African and African Studies Department was the ideal interdisciplinary home in this late stage. I would not have been there without Ted Gordon, Frank Guridy, and, especially, the selfless generosity of Eric Tang. Omi Jones, Jennifer Wilks, and Neville Hoad eagerly talked shop with me about this project. Meta Jones read my work with a level of detail I only wish I could return, with a depth of knowledge about poetics that I can only approximate. Tatiana Kuzmic and Judy Coffin listened to my angst about the book regularly. Many other friends kept me singing karaoke, going to yoga, and eating cheesecake like the Golden Girls in the last year of this book. Julia Lee was my Austin guide, my NYU pioneer, and my dog park buddy; she made my Austin time possible, and impossibly fun.
And just to prove how generous the academy can be sometimes, I have to thank colleagues at totally unrelated institutions who helped me refine this book. The DC Queers reading group has, in so many ways, been my greater DC intellectual home. Holly Dugan has read drafts of chapters and met me for cupcakes so many times. Yolanda Padilla, Shane Vogel, and Kandice Chuh have given me invaluable comments on parts of this book, as has Sangeeta Ray, whose frank and exuberant advice is always on point. And many thanks go to my NYU and ALI colleagues Eric Zinner, Ciara McLaughlin, Alicia Nadkarni, Tim Roberts, and Andrew Katz for their perseverance and patience, as well as to my anonymous readers for their thoughtful, honest, and kind readings of my work. It is a far better project because of their input.
I am deeply grateful to the authors and publishers who generously allowed me to use their work in the following pages. They have given permission to use extended quotations from the following copyrighted works: Erica Hunt, “The Order of the Story,” in Local History (New York: Roof Books, 1993); Jackie Kay, “The Red Graveyard,” in Bessie Smith (Bath, UK: Absolute, 1997), reprinted in Darling: New & Selected Poems (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2007); Honor Ford-Smith, “A Message from Ni,” in My Mother’s Last Dance (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1996); Elizabeth Alexander, “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” and “Today’s News,” in The Venus Hottentot (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1990); Deborah Richards, “The Beauty Projection” and “C’est L’Amour: That’s Love,” in Last One Out (Honolulu: subpress, 2003); Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse, 1995), reprinted in Recyclopedia (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2006); M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown, Canada: Ragweed, 1989). Sections of chapter 1 are reprinted from “The World & the Jar: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Futures of the Black Diaspora,” Atlantic Studies 7 (3) (2010): 263–84. Sections of chapter 4 are reprinted from “Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity,” in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, ed. Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
My family has supported me in every possible sense of the term since I sat around obsessively reading Jane Eyre in my youth. How can I adequately thank my mom, Joyce, and dad, Nick, for those many years of reading to me, debating everything, and helping me through my very long education? Jeff, Alex, Eileen, Jackie, the Steppies (Maureen, Caitlin, Patrick, Anthony), Mary, and Nicole always showed up when I needed them most—for phone calls, medical diagnoses, or a good laugh. Lola, Chester, and Leroy, in their adorable canineness, kept me human through this entire process. There are not enough treats in the world to make up for how neglectful I have been at times—they are very patient puppies.
Lastly, how do you thank someone who lives with you while you live with the book, day after day after years? Sean Williams put up with me at the darkest of times, when it seemed I would never change out of my yoga pants and see nonfluorescent lighting again. He brought me tacos and took the dogs to the park and stayed up with me while I added one more cite to the bibliography. He made me not think about work for a precious few hours of the day and gave me everything to look forward to when I was in the middle of working. I had no right to be so happy while finishing a book.
Introduction: The Feminist Disorder of Diaspora
There is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things; nothing that demands a sharper eye or a surer, better-articulated language; nothing that more insistently requires that one allow oneself to be carried along by the proliferation of qualities and forms.
—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things
The new order didn’t affect only poetry. It also affected history, sociology, and philosophy. West Indian society was not studied per se, as an autonomous object. . . . West Indian society came to be considered as a Paradise perverted by Europe. Everything prior to colonization was idealized. Consequently, from the image of Africa, the motherland, were carefully eradicated any blemishes such as domestic slavery, or tribal warfare, and the subjugation of women.
—Maryse Condé, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer”
In the 1924 hit “Freight Train Blues,” Trixie Smith outlines an early feminist critique of diaspora, singing, “When a woman gets the blues, she goes to her room and hides / When a woman gets the blues, she goes to her room and hides / But when a man gets the blues, he catch a freight train and rides.” Smith’s standard blues lyric inhabits what has become the black genre par excellence for the twentieth century, the blues. The paradigm of racial aesthetics, the blues represent African American suffering and histories of both physically forced and economically coerced transience, as well as the forceful originality of these historic standpoints in expressive culture. As such, the blues as a form often signify racial authenticity. Ironically, the blues are also the benchmark of black commodification and appropriation by white America and beyond in critical discussions of distribution, marketing, and circulation. Thus, the blues themselves are a complicated Foucauldian order of things—a quality and form that challenges some dominant power structures, is complicit with others, and establishes structures of meaning of its own.
The blues are representative, as a genre, of both aesthetic highs and historical lows, stories of exceptional commercial and artistic success in form and normative suffering in content, in the same generic template. Smith’s lyric engages these orders, laying bare the structure of the blues, which is deeply centered around romantic, heterosexual narratives of love and loss, and of its means of championing what seems like a deeply gendered set of options for mobility in the face of trauma and conflict. Her lyrics are also a reminder that even as representation in blues songs, like the material reality of working-class black women’s lives, constrained women to the domestic and the private spheres, the blues as a commodified skill set gave black women performers the ability to literally travel, to break the very dichotomy that the song’s lyrics suggests. This contradiction between content, performance, and distribution signals gender as a complicated shift in thinking through received political and critical orders, as Caribbean writer Maryse Condé suggests in the epigraph; yes, the blues tell “migration horror stories,” but they also necessitate a rearrangement of our politics on black artistic commodification and consumption (Davies 1994). The blues as paradigmatic “matrix” for twentieth-century black aesthetics, then, must reckon with the central significance of gender and sexuality to black form, in production, reception, and circulation, as well as in content (H. Baker [1984] 1987).
Writing nearly seventy years after Smith, African American experimental poet Erica Hunt1 extends Smith’s aesthetic map of black women’s mobility; “The Order of the Story,” her 1993 prose poem, gives this