The Difficulty of Diaspora Feminism
When Trixie Smith offers her succinct outline and implicit critique of the gendering of cultural and geographic mobility, she catches this project’s own mobile formation. Coming up in the academy at the turn of the millennium, I was part of a generation of scholars raised on Paul Gilroy’s formulation of The Black Atlantic, a manifesto to shift the nationalist frame of African American studies in the US academy that became the public site of the field’s revitalization, as well as its globalization. Encountering Gilroy’s model was an exercise in critical desire and alienation—how could I not appreciate the transnational turn that complicated definitions of blackness beyond America’s borders? How, too, could I not notice the near silence on women’s writing and cultural expressions that haunts the text’s new and sweeping conceptualization of the field?15 Following the radical extension of the African American canon to include “lost” authors such as Nella Larson and Jessie Fauset,16 and the vibrant vein of the black feminist thought of Hazel Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, and Valerie Smith, here was a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century-centered critique that left out women altogether in its focus on the ship as chronotope—a sexless, ineffable Middle Passage on one route and the possibilities of free black masculine labor on the other.17
The critical intervention that endures beyond this lack, for this project, is Gilroy’s focus on the potential of black art and cultural expression to make “race” strange and unfamiliar. The questions of gender, race, and aesthetics that center African American experiences of chattel slavery, the great migration, lynching, and Black Power, to name a few flashpoints, shift when looking at histories that also include colonialism, immigration, decolonization, and globalization. Similar dislocations of national identity formations were being staged at the same time in transnational feminist discourse and queer and gender studies. These emergent subfields called not just for a more global focus for feminist inquiry but for questioning “woman” as a sign, rather than women as already constituted, assumed subjects (Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem 1999). In particular, the field asked how gender, race, sexuality, and nation, among other identitarian categories, converged to make meaning out of “black women,” opening up what Gayatri Spivak called for in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1993)—namely, attention to the strategies of representation in both/all of its complexities.18 African and African diaspora feminist theorists, in particular, carefully attended to the material and perceived tensions between “African” and “feminist” as critical categories that mapped uneven relations between the West and the Global South.19 Feminist studies, then, began to coalesce through contradiction rather than recovery, difference rather than consensus. This embrace of difficulty has become Difficult Diaspora’s methodology for orienting race, gender, and diaspora beyond strictly historical and national frameworks and instead through a textuality that can engender and embody these fundamental tensions in the fields of feminist and diaspora studies.20
Diaspora, for this set of texts, is defined by the difficulty of “establishing an order among things”: nothing about diaspora is easy to create, to define, to fix.21 Diaspora demands the specificity of times, places, names, and dates, all the while claiming its multitudes as its major strength, its global significance. The African Diaspora (or its more specifically limited instantiation as “The Black Atlantic”) as a historical phenomenon was formed through radical experimentations in technologies of travel and commerce, including chattel slavery—innovations that built on the political and ethical worlds that preceded them and yet demanded their suspension in configuring new and frequently terrible categories of knowledge around difference. Diaspora, in the formal pathways of this book’s archive, can also challenge the order of things—the way we come to recognize and interpret our specific historical and social realities—in its difficult play between the known and the unknown, between recognizable forms of being, knowing, belonging, and acting in the world and the new forms that emerge as we try to understand its shifts.22
Diaspora’s possibilities include considering black women’s writing as an act of mobility itself, a necessary reformulation of diaspora subjectivity that undergirds the difficult diasporas I map out here.23 Black women’s writing is “a series of boundary crossings” that is highly variable and contingent, as Carole Boyce Davies (1994, 3) claims, a mobility I map in terms of both genre and national/regional affiliations. I take Davies’s and other Black Atlantic feminist work, such as Sylvia Wynter’s (2001) renegotiation of black women as the center of humanistic inquiry, as a blueprint that pushes the boundaries of representation as the frontier by and through which we recognize and make legible the category of “black women.” Difficult Diasporas seeks out these critiques not through subjects as representations but through representation itself as a subject.24 As such, I try to keep in mind Hazel Carby’s powerful call to counter “the search for or assumption of the existence of a black female language” across texts (1987, 16).
My focus on representation, then, is found not always in the obvious mimetic places but in the forms, genres, structures, and rhetorical patterns that express a relationship to various structures of meaning and reading that do not necessarily seem in direct relation to recognizable discourses of race, gender, and/or location.25 This move is one most commonly associated with postmodernism in literary criticism. Postmodernism’s relationship to African American, postcolonial, and women’s writing has been deeply debated on and across all three fields, with critics pointing to the tension between an impossible standard of “realism” and authenticity attached to racial and gendered identities and the unwillingness to cede all aesthetic innovation to a Western-defined style.26 While I see the value in interrogating these “frames of intelligibility” skeptically, as critics from Barbara Christian (2007) to Susan Andrade (2011) have thoughtfully done, I also see the critical need for feminist thinking around gender, and especially women’s literature, to explore alternate modes of representation—not just to reproduce the binaries that the “post-” in so many theoretical lexicons threatens. In the aesthetic tactics studied in this book’s reordering of diaspora, there is decidedly a call to revel in this difficult process, with the possibility of “making representation less of a burden and more of a collective pleasure and responsibility” (Shohat 1998, 9–10).27 These texts published across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries disrupt the organization and management of Black Atlantic women’s social, political, and even erotic attachments that conventional narrative strategies, themselves hybrid constructions of Western and African cultural form, lay claim to in their forms. As such, they create a new vision of post–Harlem Renaissance cosmopolitan networks of difficulty that do not rely exclusively on the privilege of travel or even a recognizable literary or political community of production. These innovative texts resist narratives of black identity that emerge as masculine and nationalist but also those that entrench a definitive culture and politics of African diaspora femininity.28 Through aesthetic difference, they generate cultural productions of black women’s subjectivity that acknowledge, in form and in content, contradiction, complexity, and difference.29
Difficult Diasporas argues that our own interpretive strategies must shift not away from form and structure but toward it. The book’s texts are not the naturalized heirs but the carefully and often innovatively constructed gendered responses to histories and patterns of black migration throughout the Black Atlantic. They call attention not just to the geographic limits placed on familiar black subjectivity but also to the aesthetic and disciplinary boundaries that undergird such cognitive systems of understanding race. If, as Paul Gilroy remarks in Postcolonial Melancholia, “the colony acted as a place