Ultimately, the innovative forms of these texts embrace the necessary partialities and disconnections of comparative work as the condition of interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, and diaspora. This book centers on innovative aesthetics to expose, connect, and remake the forms of our desire for an ordered reality and, as James Baldwin articulates, our competing need for “escape” from that order (1985, 32). As such, Difficult Diasporas rethinks “the politics of our lack of knowledge” around race and gender (Lowe 2006, 206) by disordering the regimes of both power and resistance in terms of form and convention.40 Exposing and engaging these contradictory desires offers possibilities for new, impermanent affinities that not only exist within the terms of narrative cohesion but also interact with the critical values of failure, distance, disconnection, and displacement in constructing interdisciplinary knowledge and critical practice around diaspora feminism.41
The texts studied in this book give up the romance of a reading community that makes sense, representing instead the incoherence and failures of the state, of culture, and of our own critical and creative reading practices around diaspora.42 Through the centering of an innovative archive, a diaspora feminist aesthetics can do more than represent “black women” as an already known subject and object of study. The reordering of diaspora around aesthetic difficulty can rethink black women’s foundational significance to the very key terms we use in our work, especially diaspora. Remaking these terms through innovative form, the texts of Difficult Diasporas stand, pace Hunt, as “doorways” and as “commotions” on the paths of interdisciplinary progress around questions of identity and difference; they are simultaneously maps, links, and radical interruptions of the order of things as critics of gender and race know them.
1. The World and the “Jar”: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora
A letter full of curses, again in Bessie’s handwriting to the manager of the 91 Club in Atlanta. An original record of “Downhearted Blues.” A reject selection of the songs that were never released. A giant pot of chicken stew still steaming, its lid tilted to the side. A photograph of Ethel Waters; underneath the sophisticated image Bessie has written: “Northern bitch. Long goody. Sweet Mama String Bean. 1922.” . . . A jar of Harlem night air.
—Jackie Kay, Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith’s first hit, 1923’s “Downhearted Blues,” tells a familiar blues story of love and loss using the strange and fantastic metaphor of “the world,” “a jug,” and “the stopper”: “Got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / Got the world in a jug, the stopper’s in my hand / Going to hold it, baby, till you come under my command.” These objects form a complex relationship to one another: on the surface, the lyrics are another performance of a popular heterosexual romance imperative; of course, as has been well documented, blues songs’ engagement with “love” often exposes decidedly unpopular narratives of power and loss. In “Downhearted Blues,” the world is both trouble and possibility, the jug is limited from inside and outside, and the stopper represents control as well as the inability to act. As an image of cultural and self-containment, the verse haunts with its suggestion of the capacity and agency of black subjectivity, the ordinariness of a jug holding the extraordinary body of the world.
Ralph Ellison uses a similar conceit in his 1964 essay analyzing the legacy of Richard Wright and of mainstream critical reception of black literature, “The World and the Jug”: “But if we are in a jug it is transparent, not opaque, and one is allowed not only to see outside but to read what is going on out there” (1995, 116). For him, the jug of public intellectual and artistic discourse limits how black writing (and black subjects) are held by the outside world to reflections of a particular form of tragic realism. But Ellison is also concerned with how the black imaginary contained inside of this jug is similarly shaped by the devaluing of a variety of black aesthetic practices and influences by “sociology-oriented critics” (108). Ellison’s use of the popular lyric as the metaphor he borrows for his title connects the articulation of romantic desire in a classic blueswoman’s song to the stifling insistence on social realism as the model for reading black expression and discourse. In this chapter, I take Ellison’s titular gesture seriously in order to ask what the metaphorical work of gender, desire, and cultural form might have to offer in reframing the location of Black Atlantic discourse through the reordered spaces and temporalities of Jackie Kay’s work on Bessie Smith.
This chapter engages Bessie Smith, poet and novelist Jackie Kay’s 1997 book-length profile of the blues singer, to begin to address this question, first and foremost by performing a literal gloss of the “world”; I examine how Smith’s and Ellison’s articulation of the paradoxes of power and black subjectivity relate to Kay’s decidedly broad geographical and historical spread—nineteen-sixties Scotland, early twentieth-century American South, nineteen-twenties Harlem, contemporary England. This immense and surprising “world” of the black diaspora interacts with the portability of the “jar”—Kay’s version of Smith and Ellison’s jug—as a reference to the quotidian, yet no less fantastic, spheres of gender and sexual desire that also thread through black aesthetic practice and cultural expression. Like Kay’s critically acclaimed novel Trumpet, Bessie Smith trades in the intersections of popular performance, Black British identity away from the metropole, and queer desire. Kay links the popular circulation of black subjectivity to the sphere of high formal literacy through her experimental form in the biography (made up of aneċal evidence, fictional scenarios, and autobiographical reflection rendered in various typefaces within each chapter). Kay’s revaluation of Bessie Smith’s and her own relationship to “the world” of the black diaspora through her text exposes the overlaps and incommensurabilities found in various circulating models of black women’s identity in Ellison’s sense of the juglike lens of critical discourse.
Reading Kay’s text as a model of the necessarily uneven transmissions that characterize the Black Atlantic lays the historical and intellectual groundwork for locating gender and sexuality within critical formulations of diaspora studies. This chapter traces how critical work on the black diaspora has frequently separated out popular cultural and performative work from self-consciously intellectual and political labor. Bessie Smith, I argue, repositions the integral and interruptive presence of black women’s popular performances within the genealogy of diaspora studies as an intellectual project. Kay’s text takes on the specific role of difference—sexual, gendered, geographic, and racial—within Smith’s work as a critique of totalizing narratives of blackness. In doing so, the text relocates the center of Black Atlantic discourse away from the metropolitan and toward a private genealogy of reception, one that finds that desire, race, and identification are much more slippery to define across the vast temporal and spatial variety of the black diaspora. As Katherine McKittrick argues in Demonic Grounds, looking at the nexus of race and geography can “make visible social lives which are often displaced, rendered ungeographic” (2006, x). Pushing this politics of location further, I argue that Kay’s text imagines a methodology for diaspora that traces the circulation of black cultural commodities, rather than the literal travel by black subjects, as a way to incorporate into the field a sustained engagement with difference. The violations of time, space, and subjectivity that Kay’s text foregrounds shift how we keep track of the critical locations of the Black Atlantic as a bounded historical moment with a legible intellectual past. Instead, Kay’s work challenges us to perform feminist revisions of diaspora and its critical futures through her geographic, historical, gendered, and queered interruptions of the recognizable routes of the black diaspora. This chapter suggests that these expansive modes of discursive circulation that characterize the black diaspora can also be innovative circuits for critically reading black women’s aesthetic performances and the feminist desires that connect and ground them to intellectual practice.