diaspora as bottom—as that visceral plane of traumatized flesh and as the lyric category that threatens to contain too much meaning, from too many sources. Like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Nanny’s mythic weapon of colonial resistance, diaspora always acts as a distinct site and moving target, circulating outside of its purportedly “fixed” historical trajectory, even of assumptions about the very history of black women’s bottoms, usually traced back solely to the display of the Venus Hottentot. Alexander and Richards attempt to perform this tricky genealogy, one that both is documentable and exceeds the archival frame, in their own version of “difficult diasporas.” Following on Ian Baucom’s suggestion of a politics of cosmopolitan “interestedness” that exposes and charts the myth of reciprocity, their poetic practices attempt “to recover . . . the negative, the singular, the exceptional, or the evident not as a sort of lost foundation but as something that emerges on the far side, and in consequence of, the dialectical operation, a relational poetics, or the act of setting to work” (2005, 232, 229).
As Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo argues about the fraught terrain of black cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, “people of African descent’s approaches to public self-representation were born, in significant part, of the Atlantic power structure’s attempts to deny them access to cosmopolitan subjectivity,” which she defines as “the definition of oneself through the world beyond ones own origins” (2005, 10, 9). Kwame Anthony Appiah further defines cosmopolitanism as “the idea that we have obligations to others” with whom we share no direct familial or national ties as well as the respectful acknowledgment of our particular difference from those same “others” (2007, xv). Far from fearing the too-capacious object of a burgeoning diaspora studies, Alexander’s and Richards’s poetry recasts these challenges and tensions in iconic, isolated figures, figuring a critical “loneliness” and lone-ness as both myth and method. This aesthetic unevenness pushes the incommensurability between origin and the physical and emotional impossibility of locating any pure original source. Alexander and Richards reflect on this constant tension through a cosmopolitan poetics, exhibiting the vast variety and incompleteness that shadows diaspora and its critical narratives of gender.
Alexander’s and Richards’s (and Ford-Smith’s) critiques of the burdens of representation shift against the growing order of their forms or, as Meta Jones so aptly terms it in referencing Alexander’s poetics, against both poets’ practices of “syntactical restraint” (2011, 108). This poetic form mirrors the “narrative restraint” that Saidiya Hartman both performs and calls for in taking up subjected black bodies—in particular the body of the Venus Hottentot—as the subject of history (2008, 12). Such a tactic again invites the move to “a discourse on black alterity. . . . This discourse of ‘other blackness’ (rather than ‘black otherness’) has recently begun to move into a larger discussion of multiplicity and dissonance—the flip side of unity or homogeneity—of African American cultures and identities” (Mullen 2012, 68). What Harryette Mullen marks as poetic “dissonance”—the musical emission of hybridity or hybrid bodies of text—is the ordered, conscious, purposeful, and yet disordered body that Alexander’s and Richards’s cosmopolitan poetics come to represent—as breaks with what had been subsumed under the rubric of the “real,” what has limited the genealogical lines available to construct black identity in the face of divergences and differences such as location, education, class status, sexuality, or other “somatic presence[s] of alterity” floating in the world of blackness that they map (H. Young 2006, 16).
The strategy for both poets is to claim the full stakes of representation “within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-predication, on the other—[these two senses of representation] are related but irreducibly discontinuous” (Spivak 1988, 275), not through history but through poetry. Representation here references, both directly and indirectly, a genealogy of black women’s performative bodies, “bottoms” which are/have been disciplined by colonial history. But then there is also the body of text itself (not mutually exclusive from reference but different nonetheless), the structure of the poetry, the form it adopts, which acts as a historiography, an education which may not look like pedagogy, history, or genealogy. In this, the (poetic) body “as a form of memory is also a difficult thing,” as Hershini Young articulates in her study of diaspora women’s novels, and also an aesthetic thing (2006, 6). Alexander and Richards read race and sexuality into a history of the aesthetically generative sites of poetic reeducation, keenly aware that the difficult poetic work is to recognize the great variance and simultaneity that the black body claims as its historical and cultural geography.
As Honor Ford-Smith’s contemporary version of Nanny/“Ni’s” bottom suggests, this chapter also critiques attempts to move from the burden of visibility to a space of subjective interiority. In Ford-Smith’s imaginative rendering, poetics allow Nanny to both acknowledge and dismantle the narratives surrounding her historical tops and bottoms, engaging in a discourse of loneliness or longing for recognizable interaction with and in social and cultural narratives—“lovers or children or invented dreams”—to characterize this ambivalent critique. In taking up iconic cultural figures and forms, Alexander and Richards also take on this other “burden” of giving voice to the consciousness of their subjects. Both choose to expose this practice of representing interiority as an equally tempting and problematic surface, a narrative practice no less “invented” than colonialist representations of black women. As Jenny Sharpe articulates in her discussion of Nanny, to study iconic black women is a “paradox,” in that they are “the most prominent” but “also the most invisible in the archives” (2003, 1). Official narratives and historical records compete with oral tradition and post-Independence and Civil Rights referents. As several modern critics of race and aesthetics note, the two need not compete for “good” representations of black women’s bodies: Janell Hobson (2005) locates both ongoing trauma and aesthetic revaluing in the legacy of Baartman, for instance, while scholar Meta Jones sees an impulse in contemporary black women’s writing to “engage[] in a subversive revision of the black literary tradition” (2011, 7), adopting and remixing history simultaneously. Ford-Smith’s “Message from Ni” dramatizes this tension between narrative play and corporeal historical materialism, indicating that “surface,” like “bottom,” need not be read as irrelevant, negative, or something to get beyond/over but instead may be read as a critical space to inhabit. This chapter reads the formally challenging poetics of Alexander and Richards as attending to the gaps between the transmissions of history and memory in the black diaspora through the interactions between consequential bodies and the surfaces—the images, sounds, and texts—in which black women’s bodies are frequently and publicly remembered.
Bottoms Up(lift)!
The general “problem” of (late-capital) practices of reference is one of correspondence, between the linguistic sign and “any actual object,” as Linda Hutcheon articulates (1988, 143–44). But what can we make of poet Elizabeth Alexander’s use of diasporic reference, her postmodern recasting of nineteenth-century performer Saartjie Baartman, “The Venus Hottentot,” and her infamous bottom: “in this newspaper lithograph / my buttocks are shown swollen / and luminous as a planet” (1990, 5)? The surface of Alexander’s poem could be read as a correction of the referent or, at the very least, the reproduction of the shock of racial and sexual exploitation to right the historical representation—marked by the date in the poem’s full title, “The Venus Hottentot (1825).” But in choosing a date nearly ten years after Baartman’s documented death, Alexander’s referential world grows beyond the discipline of chronological history, into the realm of the posthumous power which references to race, gender, and sexuality signify. As the lines just quoted demonstrate, these excesses of historical reference include those circulated by print and empirical culture. And though Alexander’s poem speaks to modes of resistance, it dwells most frequently in lyric engagement with and in the bottom. If Baartman is a science experiment, she figures on a large scale; her most famous referent, her bottom, metaphorically corresponds to a poetic world of value unto itself, one infused with narratives of shame and inferiority as well as intellectual curiosity and cosmopolitan desires of and for diaspora engagement.4
Alexander’s
