Difficult Diasporas
The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic
Publication Year: 2013
Published by: NYU Press
Acknowledgments
I feel like I have had such a charmed intellectual existence that I do not know where to begin expressing gratitude for the writing of this book. I suppose a sort of intellectual history would organize it as well as any: At Rutgers, I had the good fortune of stumbling into classes with some of the smartest, most generous professors and peers I have found since: ...
Introduction: The Feminist Disorder of Diaspora
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 ...
1 The World and the “Jar”: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora
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 ...
2 It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body
Jamaica’s mythic folkhero Nanny of the Maroons—famed for a story of catching colonial bullets in her bottom and, as described in the first epigraph, returning that fire—stands as a contemporary postcolonial and national hero through this fabulist, if indecent, narrative. The fantastic nature of her story lies in the apparent ridiculousness of its site, its ...
3 The Drama of Dislocation: Staging Diaspora History in the Work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo
In 2007, Ama Ata Aidoo’s play The Dilemma of a Ghost was staged in London’s Africa Centre, in association with the National Theatre Company of Ghana, as a commemoration of the fiftieth year since Ghana’s independence, and the two hundredth anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade.1 The drama seems an unlikely choice for inclusion in ...
4 Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity
Zora Neale Hurston begins her 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression” with an invocation of “drama”—not her own theater pieces or those Difficult Diasporas studied in the previous chapter, but instead the “drama” of black linguistic practice: “Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is ...
5 Intimate Migrations: Narrating “Third World Women” in the Short Fiction of Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and Pauline Melville
Erna Brodber, in an essay ruminating on the stakes of realism in literature and beyond in the Caribbean, tells a brief anecdote of Alexander Bedward, a Jamaican man in the early twentieth century who purportedly tried to fly in emulation of biblical narratives of ascension. Her punchline (of the essay and the anecdote) echoes her genre-bending ...
6 Impossible Objects: M. NourbeSe Philip, Harryette Mullen, and the Diaspora Feminist Aesthetics of Accumulation
“No language is neutral,” Canadian diaspora poet Dionne Brand flatly states in her 1990 poem and eponymous collection; the innovative realisms of the previous chapter, as well as the various mixed-genre techniques of all of the texts studied in this book, take pains to explicate what, on its surface, seems a basic claim. Literary representation, as ...
Coda: The Risks of Reading
Sylvia Wynter labels academics the “grammarians of our present epistemolocial order” (D. Scott 2000, 160), an ambivalent position at best that sees critical work as parsing out the rules of knowledge production around race, gender, and location. Ama Ata Aidoo articulates in the first epigraph a similarly unsettling aesthetic role for diaspora women’s writing ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780814789360
E-ISBN-10: 0814759483
Print-ISBN-13: 9780814759486
Print-ISBN-10: 0814759483
Page Count: 288
Publication Year: 2013
OCLC Number: 854585561
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Difficult Diasporas
