Proximate Practices?: Gender, Diaspora, and the Rise of Black Internationalism

Diaspora 12:2 2003 Proximate Practices? Gender, Diaspora, and the Rise of Black Internationalism Kate Baldwin University of Notre Dame The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Brent Hayes Edwards. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. When Langston Hughes set off for Russia in June 1932, he packed a victrola and several records by Louis Armstrong and Ethel Waters. Hughes brought these unwieldy objects at the urging of his friend, Louise Thompson, the organizer of the group of African American artists, writers, and activists with whom Hughes was traveling . Hughes’s attachment, aesthetic and otherwise, to blues and jazz is clearly etched in the work he had produced in the 1920s. His two collections of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes for a Jew (1927), push the apparent limits between modern poetic verse and song verse, fusing modernity and orality. Hughes’ memoir of his Soviet journey, I Wonder as I Wander, underscores the lure of mixtures. In his own sparse prose, Hughes recalls that his victrola created a “social center” wherever he traveled. He recounts how Jews, Russians, Asians, Mongolians, Uzbeks, and “Turkomans ”1 flocked to his room in Ashkhabad (now in Turkmenistan), and explains, “Everywhere around the world, folks are attracted by American jazz. A good old Dixieland stomp can break down almost any language barriers, and there is something about Louis Armstrong’s horn that creates spontaneous friendships” (114). Hughes’ comment stakes out a transnational space that echoes much of the Soviet dogma of internationalism to which Hughes describes being subjected while traveling in Central Asia. The jazz that “everywhere around the world” breaks down language barriers suggests Hughes’s version of an internationale, at least rhetorically. While resonating with a Leninist cross-national intent, however, Hughes’s prose modifies Soviet jargon on a number of levels. As a location, or dislocation, “everywhere” is at once “no where,” just an abstract concept. And yet, “everywhere” in Hughes’s renovation is a space created through a kind of affect, or mood, of enticement produced by a specific music, American jazz. That American jazz speaks to everyone insinuates that it also speaks from a particular xxxxxxxxxxxx 231 Diaspora 12:2 2003 location: it is a black offspring, forged by, among other strains, the voices of black vernaculars, black working-class cultures, and the blues. Hughes implies that such a genealogy is key to the seemingly easy mobility, the translatability, of American jazz. However, as he underscores, inasmuch as the Dixieland stomp “can break down almost any language barriers,” it also stops short of lacking mediation , of an erasure of all barriers, of breaking down all difference.2 Hughes’s theorization here, his prosaic creation of a mobile and diasporic “social center” forged on a contingency of difference, anticipates the kind of social configurations Brent Edwards describes in his book The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Bringing together the voices of francophone and black American intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, The Practice of Diaspora is a wide-ranging and precise piece of scholarship that traces the circuits of black internationalism through the diverse intersections and divergences of black intellectuals in and around Paris between the wars.3 The book is divided into five carefully researched and elegantly written chapters framed by a substantial preface and conclusion. The linking strands, of which there are several, include the contention that the African “diaspora” must be thought of not only in terms of linkage across diversity but also as embedded in the various differences (national, linguistic, racial, temporal, class, gender, etc.) that compose such diversity. Edwards highlights the seams within the articulations of a diasporic discourse, making as much of its inherent discontinuities as of its linking strands. He illustrates the ways in which misreading and mutual incomprehension played a constitutive role in the forging of a black internationalism. (While Edwards’s diasporic model concerns the African diaspora, his theorizations have implications for other diasporic groupings as well.) Noting the anachronistic application of the term to interwar transatlantic cultural production, Edwards relies on the inventedness of his use of “diaspora” to describe the gathering of peoples of African descent in Paris...