including her own text, points not to the resistant object itself as much as how its frame takes both Kay and the reader out of the assumed circuits of African diaspora circulation.
First and foremost, Kay’s unusual frame is Black British, or Scottish, to be exact, in comparison to the (African) American South. Claiming only the refrain from a popular song as reference, Kay vividly imagines a fairly stock vision/version of the South. Touching the atlas, her narrator starts with negation: “Well, it wasn’t like Glasgow. It wouldn’t be like anywhere I had been” (1997, 16). Blackness, for Kay’s exceptional Scottish black diaspora experience, is a series of external, Americanized references—a cinematic Western, an atlas, a series of song lyrics. That blackness registers as paradigmatically American, rooted in the folk of the South at the cusp of the great migration, is not surprising given the late-capital centrality of that narrative’s dispersal in cultural flows. It is also not surprising for the Black British context, in which “black” as an identity and a community struggles to find visibility in the multicultural state—a difficulty most famously reported by Gilroy’s infamous title, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack” (1991). The cultural production of Black British citizens, who do not discursively figure in the national imaginary, signals not just to nostalgic home communities but to global connections to the most powerfully identified community of black creative and intellectual production, African American culture.
But even as large portions of Bessie Smith traffic in this seemingly one-way global economy, Kay’s text interrupts the process by figuring American blacks as curious and creative about places outside of that “river” of American black folk culture. Kay constructs this through imagined contact with the aforementioned lost trunk, negotiated through Smith’s sisters: “Before they died, Tillie and Viola sent it on a ship headed for Scotland. They had seen pictures of Scotland and liked the look of the country, those big goddam mountains” (1997, 57). Shipping the archive away from recognizable blackness, Kay imagines that infamous trunk filled with three and a half pages’ worth of black commodity culture, from “Ma Rainey’s gold fillings” to a Cadillac steering wheel to documentation of death and marriage (60). The search for black history is material and embodied (baby teeth) as much as it is ephemeral (the air in the jar)—and the inorganic sits next to the natural, much as the radical break of emigration leaves Black British identity uneasily and unevenly in proximity to British colonial ideology. Kay’s injection of Scotland into the imaginary of the black South, the reverse route, and her desire to locate the archive of the blues outside of the major ports of the Black Atlantic, is also her bid to map black international and intellectual practice, as well as history, as an unpredictable geography, where the territory of black women’s imaginary practices creates material futures unaccounted for in the obsessive focus on official documents of print and state culture.
Kay does not recenter the margin as much as she converts location into an object—the transurban commodity of the black site becomes mobile, a cite and a cipher.21 Less invocation than circulation, these objects do not stand in for but are the black diaspora—counted along with the archive, print culture, and the lingering effects of the past. Alongside this are the affective resonances of these diaspora objects and their surprising present meanings—hurtling even sooner toward unsettling and unpredictable future uses. Kay’s text makes use of the past not just for the present but for the radical potentiality of diaspora circulation and (dis)connection—tracing what gets “lost,” not to be lamented but to be made up wholesale, again. Diaspora is made to awkwardly fit into a future that it never imagined as its domain, in order to highlight the disjuncture that characterizes black experiences of modernity and of diaspora. Incommensurable loss and incompatible knowledges are the base of Kay’s black world, where even when “found,” the “lost” blackness does not come from or mean what it should. This occurs even as Bessie Smith tries to break Bessie-as-icon’s story, into the queer time and space of even those black objects we may read as clear, contextualized, familiar—the blues, for instance. Diaspora, despite the text’s longing for recognizable narrative and troping, is far stranger to account for than its historically and geographically bounded disciplinary arguments entail. Kay bleeds genres, blending history into myth, authenticity into self-conscious construction, pattern into innovation, imagination into tradition. Within the limits of who and what we might recognize as “Bessie Smith,” Kay finds room for the world and the jar, the universal and the particular, difference and detail.
Kay’s text sees and seeks difference within the diaspora because of that drive toward definition, toward the object of “knowing” Bessie Smith, the blues, or the Black Atlantic. That play between lost and found is the play between desire and innovation. Out of a wish to belong to, or to speak to, community also comes a desire for distinction, or rather a claim to it. Smith is representative and exceptional, as is Kay’s approach. Glasgow, Harlem, Chattanooga—they are jars and worlds each, available in their material and historical specificity as well as their more portable, metaphoric resonances. Bessie Smith suggests that what is lost in diaspora scholarship that attempts to lock down, intentionally or not, more singular strains/routes of blackness is a sense of the necessary simultaneity of the world and the jar, of how even radical specificity can translate and transport to the unpredictable time of critical futures.
The order of the things in Kay/Smith’s imaginary trunk, then, is the order of diaspora—which is still, for Kay, the order of location. In the economy of travel, the thing is always already a souvenir, a memory/metonym of the Other. In the economy of emigration, the thing is either reminder or imperial commodity, the play between local and global. Both are locked in the thinking of late capital, in which history is marked by the consumption of metonymic things and their transport. For Kay, this logic of enchantment/disenchantment both holds firm and is violated by turning travel and emigratory space into the contact with and scope of what Lizabeth Paravasini-Gebert calls “transit”—evoking less definite yet more repetitive routes to the diasporic practices of black women subjects.22 This circulation suggests a different order, timing, and geography of distribution, in Kay’s text, so that Bessie Smith as historical figure can travel from tent shows to Harlem to Mississippi to Chattanooga (“down and out” to “down” and “out”), while her aneċal and iconic presence registers her in publicly and privately consumed objects, here collected from the geography of Glasgow to the print-culture artifact of a British queer profiles series. While Kay may still rely on the trope of haunting that seems to follow black women subjects, her form and structure insists on location and material—Chattanooga, trunks, wax—the constant transit between “lost” and “found” object, between the archive and the imaginary, public and private space, and the relationship between object and context, or, for Kay’s text, object and collection that redefines diaspora.
Bessie Smith, as print-culture document, projects itself into the act of collection, even as it stands as one profile in a series of queer recoveries of creative icons, from David Hockney to Benjamin Britten. Kay’s “Outline,” as the series is titled, of Smith’s queer history takes travel and more particularly transit as its structure in an attempt to collect the disparate references and evidence of black women’s subjective and sexual desires, many of which cannot register without the intellectual weight of archival narratives to infuse them with singular meaning. Kay’s focus on travel in her profile of Bessie Smith, indeed, has much to do with this traveling desire for identification and black women’s particular inability to locate a documented home in diaspora studies and late-capital discourse: “Even later in her life when she could have afforded not to travel all over the place, she continued to do so” (1997, 30). Kay goes on to label Bessie a “travel addict,” claiming that her compulsively touring was not just out of a romanticization of live performance (which is frequently coupled with a reviling of the recorded commodity, impossible for Kay as it is her only available narrative record and “encounter” with Smith) but because of the ability to act out queer desire outside of the constructs of domestic geography. Kay ultimately sees the reperformance and recirculation of Bessie Smith’s music—as well as the performer’s iconography in the form of stories which the speaker resituates to literally create a system of exchanges—as a process of traveling queerness, or what queer theorist José Muñoz
