Diasporadas: Black Women and the Fine Art of Activism

Diasporadas Black Women and the Fine Art ofActivism BONNIE CLAUDIA HARRISON Why areAfrican-American tvomen and our ideas not known and not believed in? —Patricia Hill Collins 1991 Diasporadas A Diasporada is a woman who transgresses national and political boundaries and is empowered by inserting Black and female voices into a transnational Black public sphere.1 1 use this term to describe Black women's experiences in the African Diaspora, and theirunique edmonia lewis, forever free, 1867. forms of leadership in African American social movements. AfroU .S. American women, including Edmonia Lewis, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, and Elizabeth Catlett, forexample, are Diasporadas who worked as visual artists during the mid-nineteenth century and the twentieth century.2 These Black women created images that asserted Black identity and independence, in part by de-centering traditional European subjects and centering subjects ofAfrican descent, and they also supported, worked within, and sought transnational Black activist communities. [Meridians:jèminism, race, transnationalism 2002, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 163-84)©2002 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 163 Diasporada is a word that I have coined from a hybrid of"diaspora" and "desperado." The word "diaspora" refers to the often forced dispersal of a cultural, class, or racialized group; in this sense, I refer specifically to the temporal and geohistorical domain ofthe Black Atlantic. The other halfofDiasporada, the word "desperado," was coined during an English passion for Spanish words in the sixteenth century. During this period, the fashionable would add "ado" to the ending ofregular English words to imitate a thrilling Spanish flourish. Thus the English added the suffix "ado" to desperate, to create "desperado," "tornado" came from adding "ado" to "torn," and "bravado" was "ado" added to the word "brave."3 Desperado is an alteration of the word "desperate," meaning to be rash, extreme, or agitated. In honor ofthe subversive traditions ofBlack women transgressing boundaries to seek what was officially or surreptitiously denied them, such as recognition in transnational leadership or admission to white-onlyart schools, a feminized "ado" or "ada," is added to "desperado" to form "desperada." Desperada evokes the desperate and radical act ofbecoming invoked by women who have pushed beyond the limits imposed on their sex and race. Diaspora welded to desperada becomes the word "Diasporada." In this essay I focus on the activisms that have characterized the lives and work ofAfro-U.S. women in the fine arts. My discussion embraces Black visual politics, the gendered politics ofracial uplift, and the social and political interventions ofDiasporadas, and I am interested in howthe lives and work of these Black women challenge historical conventions about Black leadership. Black Visuality Though not often recognized, much ofthe history ofBlack visual artists is linked for numerous political, sociocultural, and economic reasons to the social politics oftheir communities. Art historians suggest that as a group Black artists have maintained strong ties to Black activist institutions including churches, racial and gender uplift groups, sororities and fraternities, and civil rights organizations, particularly in the last partofthe nineteenth centuryand the firstthree-quarters ofthe twentieth century (Lewis 1990, Patton 1998, Powell 1997). As artists, their work contributed to the effort to change derogatory racial representations about Black people, and confirmed their ability to create fine art when 164 BONNIE CLAUDIA HARRISON racialized ideologies claimed that Black people were not capable ofsuch work (Tesfagiorgis 1993). These artists created affirming images ofBlack humanity that countered increasingly negative post-emancipation representations ofBlack people in U.S. visual culture. Hazel V. Carby writes that the politics ofrepresentation for Black artists was therefore twofold, "as it is formally understood in relation to art and creative practices, and as itapplies to intellectuals who understand themselves to be responsible for the representation of'the race'" (Carby 1987, 164, emphasis added). In "The Face and the Voice of Blackness," which introduces Facino History: The Black Imaae in American Art: 1710-1940, Henry Louis Gates Jr. suggests that the turn ofthe century's "New Negro" rejected the possibilities of"visually structuring a Black identity." Gates argues thatin relation to the overwhelming degradation of contemporaneous images of Black people between 1710 and 1940, Afro-U.S. Americans were not engaged invisual politics (Gates 1990). Instead he...