Disarticulating Black Internationalisms: West Indian Radicals and The Practice of Diaspora

The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, Brent Hayes Edwards. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-674-01103-1

One of Claude McKay's unique contributions to the field of transnational black studies was his ability to bridge the multiple cultural worlds of the African diaspora. As much as Banana Bottom remains a classic in anglophone Caribbean literature, McKay is certainly as well known for his novel par excellence of the HarlemRenaissance, Home to Harlem. In The Practice of Diaspora Brent Hayes Edwards turns our attention to a third of McKay's works of fiction, the picaresque novel Banjo: A Story without a Plot. One of a group of works that connected the cultural productions of the Harlem Renaissance with the Négritude movement in the francophone black world, Banjo served as an inspiration for young black scholars living in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century. In his 1987 biography of McKay, Wayne Cooper recounted Négritude figure Léopold Senghor's recollection that every francophone colonial in Paris was reading Banjo upon its publication in 1929, amazed and gratified to find this rare discussion of coloniality and blackness in the French metropole.¹

Historical intersections such as these are the starting point for Edwards's study of transatlantic conversations between multiple figures from the francophone Caribbean and Africa, such as the Nardal sisters, René Maran, Tiemeko Garan Kouyaté, and Kojo Tovalou Houénon, and leading African Americans of the Harlem Renaissance, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, and James Weldon Johnson. Anglophone Caribbean figures such as Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay also make a significant appearance. Retracing these encounters between black intellectuals from both the anglophone and the francophone world in Paris during these crucial years, Edwards is able to make much broader theoretical and historical claims concerning the role of translation itself, as it shaped both the commonalities black intellectuals shared in their experience of diaspora, and the challenges they faced in communicating their profound differences amid racial sameness. Translation is both a literal activity and a theoretical intervention, central to Edwards's excavation of the "practice of diaspora" in a multilingual black space somewhere between America and France:

The cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation. It is not possible to take up the question of "diaspora" without taking account of the fact that the great majority of peoples of African descent do not speak or write in English. . . . [O]ne can approach such a project only by attending to the ways that discourses of internationalism travel, the ways they are translated, disseminated, reformulated, and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference.

(p. 7)

Edwards's account of the "rise of black internationalism" demonstrates profoundly what we gain by developing a more multilingual approach to black cultural studies and texts. The Practice of Diaspora relies heavily on an impressive and previously unseen archive of correspondence and journalistic exchanges between francophone intellectuals, editors, and activists in Paris and their counterparts of the Harlem Renaissance. Edwards also traces the development of related diasporic constructions of blackness in fictional forms, specifically in Banjo, but also in René Maran's Batouala and W. E. B. Du Bois's Dark Princess, all published in the 1920s. Throughout, Edwards's discussion is shaped by four key concepts, all of which appear in the text's full title: "diaspora," "literature," "translation," and "black internationalism." In the execution of his argument, the first three terms ultimately function to disarticulate and break apart the establishment of any imagined coherence to the fourth. Edwards deploys terms such as "diaspora" and "translation" to reveal the discursive heterogeneity and disjunctures within "literatures" of black internationalism.

A discussion of Edwards's use of these concepts can serve as a useful entrée into the stakes of his project and its place in a broader...