practices—for example, Deborah Richards’s Last One Out, with its layered text boxes, quotations from European travel narratives, and references to actress Dorothy Dandridge nested into a single poem or the unusually structured short story cycle/novella You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, with its singular narrator but large gaps in temporality and location. If poetry has long been the only scene for looking at poetics, this book also expands that terrain, thinking through the forms of prose from Jackie Kay’s mixed genre profile of Bessie Smith to Zora Neale Hurston’s uneven ethnography of the Caribbean, to the postmodern metatextual parts that make up Erna Brodber’s fragmented novel, to the complex relationships between plot and sequence that define the small-scale fictions of Bessie Head’s, Zoë Wicomb’s, and Pauline Melville’s collections. At the center of these prose and poetic negotiations lie both poetic interrogations of diaspora, in the form of nonnarrative collections and book-length lyrics, and perhaps the most critically neglected genre of black expression, experimental theater.
Hence, I begin with Jackie Kay, a black Scottish writer of growing reputation, and the author of the Jazz-era transgender novel Trumpet, whose poetry and prose writing sit just outside the bounds of black recognition because of their focus on sexuality, transracial adoption, and Scottish culture. What happens when her liminal black experience comes into contact with what we might think of as a paradigmatic racial subject in the figure of blues singer Bessie Smith? How does someone who came to be and to know blackness outside of its normative boundaries—geographic, gendered, sexual, cultural—negotiate that diasporic identity differently, in literary form, than those who have access to easily marked routes? This first chapter, “The World and the ‘Jar’: Jackie Kay and the Feminist Locations of the African Diaspora,” focuses on Kay’s 1997 work Bessie Smith, a biographical contemplation of the blues singer mixed with a memoir of the author’s relationship to Smith’s image and recordings. As an amalgam of the blues and the discordant location of nineteen-sixties Scotland, this text lays the groundwork for reading diaspora through gender and sexual difference. Kay’s process of reincorporating Smith into Black British experience redefines the future of diaspora studies through connections that move unevenly across distant axes of space and time. I analyze nonsyncretic links between unlikely temporalities and geographies in Kay’s genre-bending prose, arguing that these aesthetic reconfigurations conceptualize the African diaspora as constitutive of queer and feminist readings beyond a literally traveling subject.
In subsequent chapters, I choose combinations of authors and texts that act as just such “doorways” across national, regional, and reputational borders, in order to critically enact the kind of disordered diaspora that these works call for in their form. I move from Kay’s rearrangements of the foundational geographies of diaspora through gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and cultural circulation in the first chapter to poetic unsettlings of our understanding of the black body in the book’s second chapter, “It’s Lonely at the Bottom: Elizabeth Alexander, Deborah Richards, and the Cosmopolitan Poetics of the Black Body.” Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot (1990), and Richards’s Last One Out (2003), both poetry collections, reference black popular cultural figures such as Saartjie Baartman (the titular Venus Hottentot) to remap the difficult genealogy of black corporeality. Like Kay’s study of Smith, each collection explores how public concepts of race and gender take form in transatlantic visual and performative iconography, using modernist and postmodernist formal strategies. In doing so, these collections consider and critique models of diasporic subject formation that lean on example, exception, and recovery, creating instead a network of compromised affiliations and cosmopolitan desires that acknowledge both the pleasures and dangers of representation. Tracing a range of alternative ways to engage the vexed black body through its very visible global circulation, Alexander and Richards establish a new genealogy of black women’s bodies in innovative form. Alexander’s accessibly innovative poetic form reorders the legacies of iconic raced and gendered representations, as does the critically neglected Richards in her text-box visions of actress Dorothy Dandridge.
In the third chapter, I take on a crucial period of black and experimental theater’s popularity in the explosive political and cultural scene of the nineteen-sixties by reaching across to Africa not for inspiration but for actual textual production. The unruly historical bodies renegotiated in chapter 2 lead to the embodied performances of history itself in chapter 3, “The Drama of Dislocation: Staging Diaspora History in the Work of Adrienne Kennedy and Ama Ata Aidoo.” Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1964 play The Dilemma of a Ghost and African American dramatist Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro, performed the same year, dramatize the period’s various sociopolitical movements via the innovative staging of black women’s bodies. The year 1964 marks a time attendant to explosive political and social movements in the African and African American worlds, from Civil Rights and women’s rights movements in the United States to postcolonial national independence movements across the African continent. Aidoo’s play centers on an African American woman experiencing cultural and sexual dislocation in postcolonial Ghana with her African husband, while Kennedy’s play works around the psychological disintegration of a young black student in New York City. Working at the crossroads of major countercultural investments, these plays grapple with the lingering presence of colonial histories by creating scenes that question the mimetically realist boundaries of the body: stage directions that call for a wall to move through characters on the stage, for instance. Through their generic failures to perform realist resolution, the texts dislocate popular narratives of gendered, racial, and national community across diaspora histories, including the public sphere of politics in the contemporary Africa and African America of their day. Both playwrights negotiate diasporic histories with a critical eye toward claims of racial or gendered solidarity, much as the previous chapters question singular narratives of iconic black women.
Like the first three chapters, chapter 4 looks back, this time to Zora Neale Hurston’s experimental anthropology, not just as a way of marking a legible black past but also as a sweeping study of how gender is at the heart of notions of political and cultural modernity. Paired with the critically neglected Jamaican academic and postmodern novelist Erna Brodber, who uses Hurston’s legacy as her springboard for considering the same post-Depression transnational era as the turn on which modern black feminist literary production stands, Hurston’s Tell My Horse claims diasporic affinities through form and genre as well as through location. This chapter, “Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston, Erna Brodber, and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity,” unpacks postmodern and proto- postmodern prose forms to engage a black feminist critique of “modernity” that refuses to keep black women locked into static historical notions of tradition. In Hurston’s Tell My Horse (1938) and Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), black women occupy the center of diaspora conceptions of modernity, particularly through the texts’ critique of modern African American, Caribbean, and Pan-African political movements. Hurston’s ethnography/memoir of her fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti explicitly draws links between US and Caribbean gender politics through the representation of spirit possession as a suspension and critique of the existing masculinist social order. As an imaginative reframing of the anthropological impulse in the study of race, Brodber’s novel similarly represents a Hurston-like subject possessed by diasporic black histories. Together, these prose assemblages reposition modernity—the historical and conceptual rise of rhetorics of both humanism and colonial power—as a signifier that not only is haunted by representations of gender and race but ungracefully and unevenly animates those categories’ competing discursive circulations and political imperatives. I also claim Hurston’s early text as a visionary aesthetic and generic practice, one that inspired Brodber’s own experimentation and inaugurates the genealogy of innovative textual engagements with gender, race, and diaspora that this book tracks.
The reconsideration of the generative black feminist possibilities of prose to stage the conflict of transnational experience continues in chapter 5, “Intimate Migrations: Narrating ‘Third World Women’ in the Short Fiction of Bessie Head, Zoë Wicomb, and Pauline Melville.” Through the short story collections of these South African and Guyanese writers—The Collector of Treasures (1977), You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), and The Migration of Ghosts (1999)—I explore the narrative dissonance
