Translation, Political Community, and Black Internationalism: Some Comments on Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora

Brent Edwards's The Practice of Diaspora is an important text, expanding and complicating our understandings of an African diaspora in several significant ways. The Practice of Diaspora forces readers to consider the Afro-francophone world of the twentieth century—a distinctive and neglected dimension of the archive of black critical internationalism—with and against the other linguistic, cultural, and national communities that constitute the black world. If one considers recent scholarship and dialogue concerning the many locations from where people imagine a black international community, ranging from that of Cedric Robinson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Paul Gilroy, Brenda Gayle Plummer, and Isaac Julien, one can appreciate the ways in which The Practice of Diaspora helps foreground rather than privilege the Afro-francophone world's interactions with other points on the Afro-diasporic continuum.

Methodologically, Edwards emphasizes process rather than fixed locations. Ideas and people are in movement and circulation. His focus on the networks and dialogue generated across and within the black francophone world shifts our attention away from the objects of analysis normally rounded up within social scientific explanations of cross-spatial phenomena—two or more nation-states, specifically national populations or institutions. Fittingly, the literature, aesthetic, and political criticism generated by figures such as René Maran, the Nardal sisters, and George Padmore are largely contingent upon the momentary and often elusive moments of strategic collaboration across the divides of colony, state, and national and local cultures. Thus, interstitial encounters at the margins of the political and cultural economies of the West are presented as central to black internationalist experiences.

Though there are many possible avenues for critical engagement with The Practice of Diaspora, I will focus on three aspects of this rich, erudite text: the concept and practice of translation, an interpretive device that is central to Edwards's development of an archaeology of black diaspora practices involving Afro-francophone peoples; coalition and political community, two features of black left internationalism that are assumed rather than elaborated upon in the text; and the implications of Benedict Anderson's conceptualization of a nationalist's "imagined community" for comprehending black diaspora practices.

As Edwards himself notes, the practice of translation helps mediate rather than encompass the encounter between African diaspora subjects speaking to each other from different national-territorial spaces and linguistic communities. Edwards writes early on that "the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation," inattempts at fashioning both a sense of community as well as an oppositional stance toward the West (p. 7). The practice of translation within black internationalism is at once anthropological and linguistic, according to Edwards. Translation is an act that rarely brings the literal meanings of words and text from one linguistic community to another unscathed or in their entirety. Matters of dialect—idiomatic and vernacular expression—are often lost along the way (p. 13). Edwards's account of the various translations and misrecognitions involved in the use and misuse of terms such as Negro, negre, and hommes de couleur provides evidence of this constitutive limitations of translation. Rather than erase difference, translation postpones, displaces, and defers difference.

Edwards uses the concept of translation analogically to remind us that the complications of translation are quite similar to the complications inherent in the construction of community and in the formation of political alliances. The fusion of the two concepts, politics and community, brings about something known as a political community, actual entities of people with a disparate set of identifications and interests conjoined for very specific purposes—in this case, a black critical internationalism designed to confront and whenever possible overturn colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This analogical consideration of a black internationalist political community helps bring forth two "lessons" for understanding both the African diaspora and black critical internationalism. The first lesson is how precarious a project and idea of racial unity sits atop the irreconcilable differences between political and cultural projects within the black world. Recurrent calls for racial unity from various quarters seek to make tidy differences in ideology and visions of a...