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Coda: The Risks of Reading We experience some sadness—though mixed with some more positive emotions—at the mere confrontation with the notion of African women and writing. Nothing really tragic, and nothing really worthy of jubilation either. Certainly however, there is no denying the pathos and wonder in being an African (and a woman) with sensibilities that are struggling ceaselessly to give expression to themselves in a language that is not just alien but was part of the colonizers’ weaponry. . . . There is pathos in writing about people, the majority of whom will never be in a position to enjoy you or judge you. And there is some wonder in not letting that or anything else stop you from writing. Indeed it is almost a miracle, in trying and succeeding somewhat to create in an aesthetic vacuum. For, from the little we learnt of one another’s backgrounds, none of us writers in our formative years was involved in any formal process, through which we could have systematically absorbed from our environment, the aesthetics that govern artistic production in general, and writing in particular. —ama ata aidoo, “To Be an African Woman Writer” We need to be alert to the occasions when racialized subjects not only step into the recognitions given to them by others but provide intuitions of a future in which relations of subjugation will (could) be transformed . . . . How do these intuitions of human possibility and complexity erupt into narrative acts? —hazel carby, “Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects” Sylvia Wynter labels academics the “grammarians of our present epistemolocial order” (D. Scott 2000, 160), an ambivalent position at best that sees critical work as parsing out the rules of knowledge production around race, gender, and location. Ama Ata Aidoo articulates in the first epigraph a similarly unsettling aesthetic role for diaspora women’s writing and its complicated relationship to language, material production, and representation. She, too, hints at the difficulty, and the significance, of reading black women’s writing that has been the center of Difficult Diasporas’s inquiry. As a conclusion to the deep consideration of our 202 / coda critical reading practices around gender, race, and diaspora, I cite a location that has not yet been named in this book. When we think of our more everyday relationship to formally innovative black women’s literature , might we not just speak of opening up our scholarship, as Hazel Carby does in the second epigraph, but also our textual choices in the classroom? In 2003, in the very first course I taught on my own as a graduate student , I was foolish enough to assign Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge. Enamored with the text, I felt as if I had to teach it, in many ways, because of its difficulty. But its difficulty also made me work hard—when planning the syllabus for this course for nonmajors, tasked with teaching the tenets of literary studies through a multigenre, multiperiod platform, I thought about the arc I had to trace to get my students to this text, leaving it for last. We looked at various poems throughout the course, talked about word play and form, drove home strategies of close reading structure and form at every turn, and built thematic discussions around how race, gender, and other social constructions of difference wound up being represented through literary form—much as I and most colleagues do now. And still, as the time approached, I was nervous. There was no plot for students to hide behind, no characters, no obvious or common referents to recognizable scripts of meaning, or meaning-making. Teaching Muse & Drudge was an act of sheer will, of performative terror (for myself as the teacher and for my students)—the kind of thing only a novice would attempt and would surely regret. Of course, I had a magic trick up my sleeve: Harryette Mullen was a faculty member and was so generous that she was willing to visit my early morning class to field questions from my students about Muse & Drudge. So I tasked each of my students with writing a question to ask Mullen, about the text and/or her writing process. This was a line of questioning that, of course, most of us do not get to experience and in general one that I deflect in the classroom—author biography and intention being tempting but limited scripts of interpretation that I do not want new students to fall back on while learning to critically read literature without research support...

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