Pebbles of Consonance: A Reply to Critics

I would like first of all to thank Nadi Edwards, Michael Hanchard, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Michelle Stephens for their thorough, provocative, and generous responses to The Practice of Diaspora. I am also grateful to David Scott for arranging this occasion for a dialogue around the book. Given that it is a work of scholarship so intimately concerned with the ramifications of periodical print culture as a key transnational circuit of correspondence among black artists and intellectuals, I am honored to have this exchange in the pages of Small Axe, which has in eight short years established itself as the most vibrant forum for African diaspora criticism through the lens of the Caribbean. In my opinion, it is one of the few truly indispensable journals of the moment. In what follows, I will not attempt to reply to each and every point raised by my interlocutors. Nor will I attempt to take up the majority of their many historical points of order, disagreements of strategy, and bibliographic quibbles.¹ I will limit my brief remarks here to the major points of theoretical concern.

Feminism and Black Internationalism

Both Stephens and Sharpley-Whiting offer critiques of my attempt at a black feminist theory of diaspora in the third chapter of The Practice of Diaspora. As Stephens argues, "Because he chooses to disarticulate the historical links between black internationalism and nationality, Edwards's analysis also misses some crucial insights into gender construction within a black global imaginary," namely that black "discourses of political identity" are constitutively gendered—articulations of diaspora are all shot through with a "persistent, structural, never ending, never deviating, masculinist gender politics." The accusation in the first clause of this sentence would seem to be contradicted at some length by the responses of Michael Hanchard and Nadi Edwards. The latter notes that a major concern in the book is precisely the ways that internationalism is fractured by the "different contexts" of nationality. Hanchard, especially in the final pages of his essay, makes it equally clear that the "tension between black internationalism and nationalism" is "one of the many themes ripe for further exploration" in The Practice of Diaspora.² Certainly, to point at such a constitutive tension was one of my goals—for me, it marks one of the signal points of departure between my work and much of the most influential scholarship on the "Black Atlantic," which too often pretends that the shift to a consideration of diaspora involves a turning away from (or a transcendence of) the forces of nationality and nationalism within any discourse of internationalism.

Likewise, especially in the third chapter of the book, I attempt to make precisely the argument (that gender is one of the constitutive forces of décalage in any articulation of diaspora) that Stephens calls for in her essay. Toward the beginning of that chapter, I argue that "even in scholarship whose specific goal is to sketch a 'Black Atlantic' imaginary, there is little attempt to consider not just the way black women travel, but more important, the ways the ideological uses and abuses of gender always undergird any articulation of diaspora."³ I am concerned in the chapter with unearthing what Stephens terms "more hybrid notions of radical black femininity." Nevertheless, I do not accept her apparent suggestion that because internationalism is "haunted" by its grounding in a commitment to the model of the nation-state, it thereby follows that any investment in black internationalism necessarily and inexorably leads to a "burying" of black femininity. On the contrary, whether one is reading Paulette Nardal or Amy Jacques Garvey, Lorraine Hansberry or Angela Davis, attending to the legacy of the practice of diaspora means refusing to foreclose the possibility of—and indeed, actively seeking the instantiation of—a feminist black internationalism.

Sharpley-Whiting is more concerned with my reading of Paulette Nardal in particular. For Sharpley-Whiting, the matter revolves around Nardal's failure to mention the black...