“children” to Alexander’s “imaginary / daughters,” the genealogy of the bottom contains a progressive promise not just of/for material or remembered bodies but for performances of the social imagination itself. As several transnational feminist theorists contemporary with Alexander have also marked, these imaginative progeny signify the relational quality of “histories” and representation. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (1997) name these convergences “feminist genealogies” and mark their “dislocations” as well as their diaspora presences. Connections between popular performances marked by the nexus of gender and race are not just “covered” but rewritten into the lineage of the aesthetic and intellectual practices of a diaspora feminism.
Such acts of genealogical engagement occupy a type of spatial relationship to Alexander’s poetics. As a critical frame, genealogy offers within the structure of “reproductivity,” or exhaustive knowledge of documented heterosexuality and inheritance that excluded blacks in the New World, a set of deconstructive acts in its quest for thoroughness, its inevitable uncovering and description of the bottoms of “illegitimate” diaspora connection (Mirza 1997, 5). In Alexander’s taking up of Baartman, she imagines the failures of colonial imagination in the construction of racial difference, the “bottoms” of Western racial discourse. “Bottom” implies hierarchy, a play of power not lost on Alexander, or on Joseph Roach in his formulation of the concept of genealogies of performance, which finds its roots in Foucault: “Genealogies of performance attend not only to ‘the body,’ as Foucault suggests, but also to bodies—to the reciprocal reflections they make on one another’s surfaces as they foreground their capacities for interaction” (1996, 25). Roach goes on to suggest that the concept can “also attend to ‘counter-memories,’ or the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (26).
Alexander’s work is instructive, then, in the same way that the bottom’s value itself operates—not as a site of reproduction but as a near reference to sex itself, in both proximity to primary sex characteristics and the site/sight of desire. As such, referencing the bottom points to its capacity as a recognizable sign. Its “vulgarity,” or its obviousness, aligns with what Carolyn Cooper recasts as a literacy of the body, a text of “popular taste” (1995, 5). To claim the bottom, for Alexander, is not just to claim the significance of working-class culture but to stage the kinesthetic “performance intelligence” of hypervisible bodies as “a graphic metaphor for alternative aesthetics” (Chatterjea 2004, 24, 19)—as a reference to both the training and typology that characterize the relationship between diaspora political consciousness and aesthetic practices. How those aesthetics are read by critics and by varying audiences is Alexander’s imagined classroom scenario, “swarming with cabbage-smelling / citizens who stare and query, / ‘Is it muscle? Bone? Or fat?’” (1990, 5). The bottom, too, has its interiority, inextricable from its materiality in Alexander’s rendering. The diasporic practices of representation employed by her poetry engage what Hutcheon calls “the yearning for order” not to find, finally, correspondence but instead to map the inquiry into race, gender, and diaspora itself (1988, 157). Rather than the “dominant markers” of self and other, “leaving and arriving,” that Sneja Gunew claims as the false idols of diaspora practice, the referencing of the bottom engages in “an endless process of traveling and change” (2004, 107).
Elizabeth Alexander’s body of work challenges, through various levels of engagement with black diaspora culture, a “limited imagination” of iconic figures, local cultures, and familial drama usually associated with blackness and its public circulation (2004, x). These contested signs of blackness, gender, location, and desire become unruly yet highly conscious formal strategies that remap the multiple lines of subjectivity made possible in the histories of black women’s textual and corporeal embodiment. Alexander, as compared to many of the authors discussed in Difficult Diasporas, is not a radically formally innovative poet. She is, however, a part of “recent black poetry that has been enabled by theoretical discourse and avant-garde practices” (Mullen 2012, 69). So while her bodies of text are on the borders of the recognizable (“accessible”), these boundaries are nonetheless stretched with a range of challenging “incorporations” that we might identify as the “intertwining of abstraction and representational modalities, . . . impressing the sheer impossibility of making such monumental histories of suffering intelligible much less legible” (Miranda and Spencer 2009, 923). Sitting on the cusp of what Elisabeth Frost refers to as “hybrid avant-garde poetics” (2003, xxvii), Alexander can be framed not just in terms of what she works out in specific reference or debts but also her formal strategies. “The Venus Hottentot (1825)” finds itself at the axis of redress, or what Saidiya Hartman identifies as a practice of “counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility” (1997, 51). The poem’s cosmopolitan redress explores “the import of the performative, . . . the articulation of needs and desires that radically call into question the order of power and its production of ‘cultural intelligibility’ or ‘legible bodies’” (ibid., 56). Thus, Alexander is comfortable with the assertion “that the question was never ‘either/or’: either form or content, either black or avant-garde,” as well as being even more directly and playfully committed to challenging the discrete literacies that are assigned “as part and parcel of ‘identity,’ . . . pigeonholed by particular expectations for form and content” (Schultz 2001).
Poetic genealogy, as such, marks Alexander’s practices as innovative within a frame of recognizability: postmodernism with social memory, ludic performances of political reference. Alexander uses strategic reference, or the logic of naming, to cast a wide net in terms of what gets assigned meaning in her work, via references in poetry. Alexander’s texts join the ranks of those which are “fostering both cultural and formal hybridity to demonstrate the ‘mongrel’ nature of contemporary culture and avant-gardism itself, . . . seek[ing] a diverse lineage of its own” (Frost 2003, 138). The logic of naming, of invoking the proper (and improper) objects of diasporic black cultures, does the complex work of genealogy in that it attempts to syncretize multiple and various “lines” of black cultures through the nexus of Baartman’s legacy. Such a task is necessary to revaluing the curriculum—in the sense of an epistemological program—of Black Atlantic public culture and aesthetics.
Elizabeth Alexander’s wide sense and command of history opens up this theory of genealogical interrogation; Michel Foucault poses genealogy as a practice of history which, like Alexander’s work, depends on abundance of reference material:
Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. Its “cyclopean monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method”; they cannot be the product of “large and well-meaning errors.” In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins.” (1977, 140)
Foucault’s “relentless erudition” seems gracefully taken up in Alexander’s own poetic practice, which examines the remainders and underpinnings of other historical methodologies, in particular those which produce “large errors.” Her work on the representations of disparate cultural spheres collected in her texts similarly neither seeks blind progress narratives nor works backward to locate any authentic source of black aesthetic and/or culture. Instead, her genealogies are spatial in terms of relationships to history and audience, thinking broadly about who and where constitutes blackness, and the surprising relations of race and cultural expression.
Alexander’s work on Baartman embodies, then, what critic Angela Davis classifies as the three spheres of revision to black subjectivity and culture postslavery in the United States: travel, sexuality, and education (1998, 4). Such a revision comes in the form of “collective” culture for Davis and for Alexander. Alexander, speaking of her play Diva Studies in Callaloo, performs her knowledge
