—Jackie Kay, Bessie Smith
In a text that travels incessantly—from Chattanooga to Mississippi, from Philadelphia to Glasgow, from the US North to the South, from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-nineties, from autobiography to biographical fiction—Jackie Kay’s profile Bessie Smith spends very little time in or on Harlem. As the historical center of contemporary African American and black diaspora critical studies, and as the black aesthetic benchmark of the twentieth century, Harlem is more often than not the center of inquiry into the relationship between black literary expression and the diasporic circulation of blackness. It is, at the very least, the cultural and ideological ground where there is “sense that certain venues are more authentic than others” from which other critical territories radiate (Procter 2003, 2).
Harlem is also a resurgent area of critical interest in the past twenty years for diaspora theory, a site of renegotiating the nationalist flow of African American studies after Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking The Black Atlantic.1 The brief moments in Bessie Smith spent in this hub of black culture in the nineteen-twenties are usually related to the recording industry, as in the epigraph to this section, where Bessie is staying in Harlem to cut a record. No exception is the “jar of Harlem night air,” an item on a lengthy, three-page list imagined by Kay to populate a mythic trunk of Bessie-related materials compiled by her family and friends that “disappeared” in the nineteen-fifties, long after Smith’s death—an inventory that will figure heavily in my later analysis of the politics of diaspora circulation. The two very differently located references occupy familiar ideological spaces in theories of Harlem’s influence: Harlem as the practical and capital center of black artistic production and Harlem as the locale of the black imagination, the generative force of black diasporic performances across the twentieth century and in the critical discourse of African American studies.2 The “jar,” as opposed to the weight of Smith and Ellison’s “jug,” is a moment of textual whimsy and license on Kay’s part. “A Harlem full of black people” is a concrete, historical mark, a location “full of” racial significance and signification. While the latter has obvious implications for this chapter’s concern with the consequences of gender and class in the way we conceive of the “space” of the black diaspora, this section also takes up Harlem’s more ethereal strains that circulate with a difference in Kay’s work, as well as the way we, as critics, imagine the possibilities and portability of black diasporic connections beyond social realism or romantic fetishization.
Claiming a center for black artistic production has practical and symbolic import for Harlem Renaissance intellectuals of the nineteen-twenties. Harlem in a jar, then, is a distillation that both carries and contains the ideological and aesthetic freight of “The New Negro,” Alain Locke’s foundational Harlem Renaissance essay:
Here in Manhattan is not merely the largest Negro community in the world, but the first concentration in history of so many diverse elements of Negro life. It has attracted the African, the West Indian, the Negro American; has brought together the Negro of the North and the Negro of the South; the man from the city and the man from the town and village; the peasant, the student, the business man, the professional man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast. . . . So what began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race-welding. . . . In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital. ([1925] 1992, 7)
Here, Locke is doing the intellectual work of making Harlem a racial symbol, “full of” blackness of a particular kind. Trying to contain Harlem is difficult business, with rhetorical strategies that claim exceptionality and representativeness at the same time. Harlem as a site is an “instance,” a “first” of potentially many, or later, a “promise” of the future. As example or model, Locke’s Harlem wants to be accessible, a representative of pending communities and “New Negro” subjects around the world—a race capital, not the only one. But it is also exceptional—the “largest,” the experimental site of New Negro formation, the laboratory. As both template and a break from the mold, Locke’s work to rhetorically produce and locate Harlem as “race capital” also hails a certain elemental population as representative group. He relies on the word “man” four times in his exhaustive catalogue of Harlem’s new migrant population. It is certainly not new to point out the masculine-humanist subject that sits at the center of discursive production of the Harlem Renaissance, nor the practical reverberations of who literally can move through the “race capital” with ease in the nineteen-twenties. An extension of the masculinized citizen of this emerging Harlem is the site of Harlem itself, its ideological capital or currency that travels, taking on this gendered property.
My concern with the gendering of intellectual space here is partially because the energy of nineteen-twenties Harlem, the night air in a jar referenced in Kay’s imagined catalogue, is distinctly about a different set of aesthetic and popular practices—the “nightlife” of Harlem, its clubs and balls and scenes. This “night work” of Harlem is its romantic currency, more what we think of as the substance of Kay’s jar and Smith’s lyrics and as opposed to the “day work” of intellectually drawing on what is kept in that jar. In other words, Locke’s “Harlem” is the critical work that certifies intellectual and historical significance. But what circulates most prominently as the popular “idea” of Harlem, its source rather than its ideological product or theory, is its nighttime identity, its jazz, blues, and sexualized culture.
As the center through which the black diaspora is thought or constructed (even if it is to decenter), the day work of intellectual and literary production and the night work of performance are also sold as separately gendered spheres; the famous founding fathers of early black thought are, overwhelmingly, “fathers,” including Locke, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor, whereas essayist and author Jessie Fauset is considered a “midwife” and Zora Neale Hurston an exuberant outlier.3 The night work becomes the root and inspiration for internationalism, the performative call that allows the traveling intellectual and political project of black solidarity. Black women performers such as Bessie Smith and Josephine Baker, as the most visible signs and stars of said call, are not easily incorporated into the production of intellectual responses that we locate as the work of the black diaspora—anthologies, print culture, and even reprinted literature.
In a more contemporary moment, developments in US black feminist theory around women’s performances4 came at a time when a new subfield, that of diaspora studies, had also been emerging out of African American and postcolonial studies.5 Locke’s gauntlet, his gesture toward the cosmopolitan makeup of Harlem as location and symbol, is one that galvanizes the three major categories of time—the past (“the first concentration in history”), the present (“Negro life is seizing”), and the future (Harlem “promises to be” the center of New Negro citizenship). His challenge to this “new” field, then, is a mark of the complicated temporal territory that emerging critical discourse must occupy. Looking not just across the present cultural world but to its history and potential, Locke’s challenge has been taken up by critics such as Brent Edwards, who challenges this gendered omission in suggesting that “a nascent feminism” and feminist intellectual project was at the center of black internationalism’s discursive and practical formation. Edwards’s suggestion of a systemic approach to diaspora through feminist thought is one that potentially considers the gendered “practice” of diaspora criticism beyond mere representation of women. I come again to Harlem, and to Bessie Smith, as a possible model for the kind of day and night work that black diaspora studies can account for and model through a feminism that is in fact embedded in a set of practices not fully recognized as intellectual work.
Returning to Bessie Smith’s significance to the intellectual projects of Ellison and Kay, where can we locate her work in the context of diaspora’s intellectual routes? While black women entertainers such as Josephine Baker have been taken up as signs and even subjects of twenties and thirties black cosmopolitanism, they are rarely considered authors, or founders in the vein